I think you made the same mistake as I did first: You studied the first 75 (alphabetically) only.
BTW the Membership Board has constructed an official policy on dealing with requests for membership after the membership has expired. This adds a little additional auditing piece in the event that someone’s not willing to keep clicking the renew button. I think that, to some degree, deals with at least part of this discussion.
That said, to add my 2¤ to the general discussion, I think it’s important to remember that this is Ubuntu and that means “humanity to others.” That said, if we have members of our community who are not contributing, we shouldn’t consider them former members. We don’t need to kick them out because they’re not proving themselves worthy.
What we may want to do is to try to figure out some way to engage with members who are not contributing very much. I know Launchpad Karma isn’t worth much, but having any Karma generally means that you’re doing something with the project. Wiki contributions are another thing to look at. We could collect a couple of these things and write some scripts to generate a list of folks not contributing and maybe it could be a thing the Membership Board could do to bring them back on. Not police, but more of offering a helping hand, inviting them back in.
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This is an interesting topic and one that the Community Council once pondered.
The key question that needs to be answered is 'what is an Ubuntu member?'
When I was on the community council it was someone who had at one point contributed significantly to Ubuntu. That could have been in the form of code, bug hunting, answering questions in the forums, or local community work. Once a person had met that criteria they would be granted Ubuntu membership.
The second question then becomes 'why remove Ubuntu membership?'
- Should a person’s past contributions be forgotten?
- Do you want to make a person re-prove they are valuable to the project/community?
To be honest I do not see a purpose in removing Ubuntu membership unless the meaning of Ubuntu member has changed.
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