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Re: [Linux-aus] Authorised Members (was: Nomination for Ordinary Committee Members)

Jonathan Oxer wrote:


Personally I don't see it
as overly onerous to have to attend a LUG meeting to be verified.



...it may be fine for you and me, but many people would find it too
onerous. If we wanted to restrict LA membership to people who take the
time to learn how to drive GPG and meet up f2f with a current member
to be verified, then cool, the WoT would solve the identity problem
just like it does for Debian and other groups.



Exactly. For example, what about members who are geographically challenged? e.g. up until earlier this year, attending my "local" LUG meetings was impossible. This was due to the distance factor (i.e. 2 days solid driving 1 way to either Darwin or Perth).

Then of course there is the further issue, in that even if I did manage to attend a key signing - no one would recognise me by face anyway, so how would I get the 2 required people to confirm my identity?

However, I see Linux Australia as an inclusive organisation, not an
exclusive one. Even many geeks think GPG is too hard-core for them: in
a typical LUG only a small percentage will actually have a GPG key and
be integrated into the global WoT. It's not a matter of it being too
hard to work out: most people, even highly technically competent ones,
just aren't interested.



I'm included in this group and for that exact reason. I would consider myself a fairly technically competent person (I work as a sys admin for a large ISP), but I've never really used GPG, purely because I'm not really interested in it at the moment.

If you're going to be inclusive (which is what I think LA tries to be as much as possible), then you don't want to start building technical barriers that prevent people from becoming involved with the organisation. Alienating people before they've even started isn't really going to achieve anything much at all, even if something is a good technical solution.

Cheers,

Ben