Preventing infiltration

Hi, I agree with what you wrote, remarkably clearly, as always. Ricardo Wurmus <rekado(a)elephly.net&gt; skribis: Yes. It just occurred to me that infiltration is simple right now: submit a patch to Guix (picking it as an example because the barrier to entry is quite low), at which point you can be considered a “GNU contributor”, and could apply in bad faith, with the intent of stirring dissent. I wouldn’t want this organization to be driven by paranoia, but I think it’s a plausible scenario given what we already observed before. So yes, I’d be in favor of setting up an acceptance process real soon. Last week, Andreas explains how the Guix Europe non-profit handles membership: membership requests must be approved by its “solidary administrative council”¹. The bylaws also spell out reasons for membership cancellation (Article 7). There’s no such council/board at this point in the Assembly. Should we mimic this or other similar structures, by setting up a board of sorts? If we do, we must address at list these points: • guaranteeing turnover of the board; • defining an approval process for the initial board statutes; • agreeing on the initial board members; • ensuring the statutes don’t give the board more power than membership management. Thoughts? What do we do until this structure in this place though? We could, for example, put membership requests by non-maintainers on hold until we’ve set this up. It would be a bummer, because we want equal participation of all contributors, but that’s a simple way to prevent the obvious infiltration scenario discussed above. Another way would be to require applicants to have at least (say) two years of experience contributing to GNU in a visible way. Lots of questions. :-) Ludo’. ¹ Article 5 of its bylaws: <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/plain/guix-europe/...;.