[jdev] XSF membership application period

[Peter Saint-Andre]

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