[jdev] XSF membership application period

[Peter Saint-Andre]

Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> 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.

BTW I updated the following pages to reflect this thread:

http://www.xmpp.org/xsf/members/

http://www.xmpp.org/xsf/members/responsibilities.shtml

I hope that makes things clearer.

/psa

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