Hi, Interesting topic that raises quite a few questions.
I think that all people who have commented in that thread have not necessarily agreed if membership fees would be something in addition to the nomination and election processs, or if it would replace it. If we switch to a paid membership, one would likely have to identify the benefits brought by being a member. Voting rights for the board would probably not a big enough benefit. In the AAG example quoted by Paul, there are several benefits associated: access to journals, reduced prices to publications/meetings, etc... That would mean that there is a commitment of OSGeo to provide the advertized benefits, and thus the question on how to guarantee this commitment would arise : volunteers effort, or paid staff/contractors ? Interestingly one of the benefit of AAG membership is access to "AAG specialty groups" whose equivalent in OSGeo would probably be our mailing lists. So would we want to restrict access to those to non members ? Mateusz also mentionned that bills have to be paid to maintain some OSGeo servers, like svn. Would we want to restrict access to those servers only to the folks who have paid the membership fee ? Probably not. We have only mentionned individual members, but would we want to extend to corportate members as well ? >From my perspective, OSGeo Charter membership is a recognition for the accomplishments of an individual to support OSGeo values and missions, and thus gets a right to define its steering through board election. Perhaps we at a community sometimes fail to welcome people who would deserve it, because they are a bit outside of our usual networks to be nominated (or because people are not confortable enough to do public nominations, perhaps for language or cultural reasons), or because we reach the yearly quota for new members. That's certainly a pitty if folks feel excluded whereas I think we generally try to be rather inclusive. One thing to keep in mind is that if we translate into money the value of the accomplishments of OSGeo Charter members, I'm pretty sure that in 99.99% of the cases that translates to much more than USD 70. You can probably add one or two zeros to that figure. So asking them for a fee, in addition to their other forms of contribution, would seem a bit awkward, although I can understand that contribution in term of money rather than time is sometimes more useful. So I wouldn't object to paying a membership fee. But IMHO the main question is : do we need membership fees to sustain OSGeo ? Aren't surplus funds generated by FOSS4G sufficient for that (although I can understand that Howard's fear that FOSS4G organization by volunteers might not be a sustainable model) ? Or perhaps we would need more funds to be able to do more things ? OSGeo is perhaps rather different from other organizations in the geomatics field in the way it manages its membership, but is it more a strength or a weakness ? Even _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
