Open Stack

Due to improvements in the OpenStack Foundation member directory and
our technical election tooling, it is no longer necessary to join
the foundation as an individual member just to be able to submit
changes through Gerrit for official repositories. You do, however,
still eventually need to join if you want to be able to participate
in technical elections (as a candidate or a voter).

The Account Setup section[1] of the Developer's Guide has been
updated to reflect the new simpler process, and a separate
(optional) Eligibility to Vote in Elections section[2] has been
added. This process change significantly simplifies the onboarding
process for new code contributors by removing a very error-prone
and, for many, eyebrow-raising hurdle.

A little background: the Bylaws of the OpenStack Foundation Appendix
4 Technical Committee Member Policy[3] (section 3b) limits voter
rolls for technical elections to Foundation Individual Members. It
was never strictly required by policy to join the foundation if you
only wanted to contribute code and had no interest in voting, which
is not an entirely uncommon case for new contributors. Due to
previous technical limitations in our systems we still forced new
contributors to join, because that was the easiest way at the time
to be relatively certain who was qualified to participate in
technical elections. Now that we have a mechanism for verifying
membership on demand when validating nominations and generating
voter rolls, we have made the step of joining the foundation
optional (though still very much recommended once you reach the
point as a contributor where you want to participate in community
governance processes).

[1] https://docs.openstack.org/infra/manual/developers.html#account-setup
[2] https://docs.openstack.org/infra/manual/developers.html#eligibility-to-vote-in-elections
[3] https://www.openstack.org/legal/technical-committee-member-policy/
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 949 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/attachments/20170807/57d7090e/attachment.sig>