[jdev] XSF membership application period
Peter Saint-Andre
stpeter at stpeter.im
Wed Jul 2 10:47:21 CDT 2008
JabberForum wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have asked a wiki account for this. But before going further, I
> wanted to be sure about all what was implying such application. I am
> really interested in XMPP and would really like to participate in it.
> Moreover I think I have some spare time for this.
>
> Yet I want to be sure of all the implications of being a member. So at
> the end what does it mean? What do this membership requires from us? I
> don't see so much information about the internal organisation of XSF
> (but maybe I am not looking on the right places too).
> Thanks. :-)
The "responsibilities" of XSF members are described here:
http://www.xmpp.org/xsf/members/responsibilities.shtml
XSF members don't really do much. :) They need to vote 5 times a year
(four times a year on whether to accept new members, once a year on the
composition of the XMPP Council and the XSF Board of Directors). Plus
you need to be an XSF member in order to be on the XMPP Council.
The basic idea is that XSF needs members in order to provide a legal
structure for its standardization activities -- it is a membership
organization in which the individual members are elected based on merit,
and those meritorious individuals in turn elect the board and council.
The IETF does something similar but in a more complicated way (IMHO).
Many other standards organizations have member *companies* and require
large payments from those companies (W3C, OASIS, OMA, etc.), but you can
contribute to their standards process only if you work for one of those
companies. Although the XSF has sponsoring companies, they don't have
any special status, and XSF membership is *individual*, not corporate.
The XSF prefers to work completely in the open, so we don't require any
payments in order to participate. However, that means we don't have
fancy meetings in Hawaii and Barcelona (etc.) like other standards
groups do, instead we just hold our small "XMPP Summit" meetings at
FOSDEM and OSCON every year. ;-) Thus we do almost all of our work via
email lists and groupchat rooms, which are pretty cheap to host.
HTH,
Peter
Peter
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