New member process performance and issues (Fwd: SPI Member application for Filipus Klutiero)

[Jonathan McDowell]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 11:31:23AM -0400, Filipus Klutiero wrote:

> On 2015-06-28, I applied for SPI membership. I did not obtain any followup
> until 2016-02-03, when I received the forwarded mail.
> 
> After such a delay, my interest in SPI was low. I thought that was a big
> incident, and felt comforted to think that the processing time for my
> application was not representative. I thought my application would now be
> processed swiftly.
> 
> Yesterday, my application, managed by Martin Zobel-Helas, was finally
> processed, and I was invited to vote in the 2016 board election, which
> revived my interest in SPI and prompted me to visit its discussion forums.
> To my surprise, I could not find any mention of the issue discovered in
> February, even checking on spi-general (although there are a couple of mails
> titled "New members website / inactive contributing member cleanup", which,
> while they apparently do not treat this issue, seem related). This is why I
> am hereby forwarding the mail I received in February, even though I have no
> idea how many applications were affected.

I sent out these mails; there were fewer than 10 affected - I don't have
the exact numbers to hand, but it was a sufficiently low number that I
felt contacting those affected directly was sufficient. Additionally in
my work on the replacement members site I've had a very low amount of
feedback to anything I've posted to the lists, so I haven't felt it was
worth my while pointing out the inadequacies of the old system which are
now rectified.

> I rarely apply for membership in a software project, but it was
> unprecedented for me to apply to an opaque process like the SPI's without
> being requested to do so. I wanted to send a mail to report my experience,
> but I now realize that SPI actually has statistics about the process's
> performance on https://members.spi-inc.org/stats
> 
> These statistics follow:
> 
> NC Applicants Pending Email Approval 	a
> NC Members 	b
> Contrib Membership Applications 	c
> Contrib Members 	d
> Application Managers 	11
> 
> 
> I do not precisely understand what each of these metrics means, but this
> would certainly be most relevant for those wondering whether they should
> apply for membership.

a = those who have applied, but failed to confirm their email address by
    clicking on the link in the initial email sent on sign up. If you
    are in this state and login it should be clear your address is not
    verified.
b = Non-contributing members. Those who've completed email verification
    but either not applied to or not completed the contrib membership
    process.
c = Applications for contributing membership that are still in progress.
    All of these members will be included in "b".
d = Members who have completed the contributing membership process and are
    permitted to be subscribed to -private and vote.

Application Managers are those who are capable of handling applications
sitting in "c". Most of them are inactive.

> Unfortunately, this page is not accessible when not logged in. Could
> this be intentional?

All of the membership system other than signup requires a login; it is
trivial to obtain this so perhaps there's an argument to open up the
stats to non-authenticated logins but I've never seen a request for it.

J.

-- 
                                            xmpp:noodles at earth.li
You'll never find it, in all that loose clothing.