[Linux-aus] Re-igniting the Membership Committee

[Anthony Towns]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 11:09:06PM +1100, Kathy Reid wrote:
> The current MemberDB has *broken* functionality in the following ways:

Other misfeatures:

 * The election system doesn't handle ties (as we've seen this election)

 * At least historically, the election system wasn't really terribly
   secure against local attacks; but maybe that's been fixed

 * The election system isn't very friendly for letting members be
   more involved in decision making; eg the "name change vote" had to be
   mangled into an election for a variety of email aliases for John
   Ferlito...

 * There isn't really a strong featureset for interacting with members;
   if you do a mailout to everyone, capturing responses would be a manual
   process, eg. So even just a "please reconfirm you're interested in
   being a member of Linux Australia" or "let's send everyone a quick
   email to at least check their email addresses are still valid" means
   doing a lot of manual work.

In an ideal world, maybe as an LA member you could just press a single
button to fill in your details for registering at lca or PyCon AU rather
than having to make a new account each year, for instance.

In short, there are some reasonably significant improvements that could
be made with a better membership system, and that's been true since at
least a decade ago when I was secretary. It's *great* that people are
pushing forward on this.

Cheers,
aj