Membership Committee meeting: July 20, 2021

[clairernovotny]

Meeting agenda: Tuesday July 20, 2021

Review action items

• Tom to share information on other groups mentor programs.
  • We want to be careful to avoid risk seen as endorsing potential mentors, owning responsibility for behavior. How do we vet potential mentors to ensure they are aligned with our goals and community standards. Could be as simple as forums to enable connecting to a formal program where .NET Foundation manages the program. Do we tie to membership levels in different focus areas?
• The Membership Committee to brainstorm ways to encourage member contribution and prepare to discuss at the next meeting.

Meeting schedule

Survey sent. We'll discuss options at the next meeting. Responses missing from some. Waiting for more options. The 4:00 pm times in CEST don't work well for Ove.

Nominating committee update

• PR merged for timeline / updated committee members.
• Blog post asking for candidates. So far only 3 responses. We need 9, so now focusing on outreach to find potential candidates. Committee members were assigned different geographic regions to recruit candidates.
• Call for amplifying the recruiting post.

CoC and membership discussion

• We should mirror the policies used by the product team / project team
• We should consider recruiting members to be part of the team.
• We should consider some kind of "scale" for violations.
• Do we have policies in the membership agreement to enable enforcement? Bill to check for next meeting.
• Can we enforce on meetup, etc? Bill to investigate with Claire.
• Has (or will) the CoC change policies over time? Historically, any changes have been minor grammar updates, but not changes in policy or rules.

Fiscal year 2022

The board is having a special meeting to set goals for the fiscal year from July 2021 - July 2022. Let's discuss what the membership committee views as the goals.

• Drive toward "what is the value proposition for joining the foundation?"
• Items discussed have included:
  • Mentoring
  • contributions in OSS.
  • training for .NET Foundation members.
  • discounts for members into conferences.
  • travel assistance for conferences (in return for volunteering).
• Recurring theme: Members appreciate discounts as perks. But perks should not be the primary reason to join
  • Gamification: leveling up (tiers) could mean more perks.
  • Getting more members to participate in committees could provide more perks, and help the organization scale up more.

Side discussion:

We had a brief side discussion to determine if the new members are comfortable making contributions to our OSS projects. We believe there's an opportunity to help more members in this area.

#21 - Determine the value proposition for membership

The Membership Committee held a discussion on the .NET Foundation’s value proposition. The following ideas were discussed:

• Mentoring might be an FY23 goal. We need to deliver on the current member value proposition first.
• Education / academy might be a better cohort (20 people) for the first round of mentees.
• How do we get the first group of mentors? How do we ensure diversity of mentors?
• Do mentors self-nominate? Or is "everyone a mentor because we are part of this community?"
  First take: Informal, ask community members questions.
• What structure to questions / topics / etc? limits on areas of advice?

Other topics:

• We should develop a new Welcoming letter for new members. It should include:
  • Find organization discussion / minutes
  • Find projects
  • Join a committee
  • Find a meetup / conference
  • Specifically .NET Conf!
  • Follow us on the socials