Hello Planet GNOME readers and GNOME community members,
The board of directors has agreed that from now on, to be part of Planet GNOME, it is mandatory to be a member of the GNOME Foundation. In three weeks we will proceed to remove all blogs from people that are not foundation members. This policy change means a few things:
- If your blog is in Planet GNOME and you are not a member of the GNOME Foundation, you have three weeks to become a member!
- New planets additions from now on will take this policy into account.
- This doesn't mean that your blog automatically gets into Planet GNOME if you are a member, the same blog review process will be applied to requests for addition.
- There will be a slight exception with GSoC/GOPW members we will encourage them to join in the meantime, but being able to use the planet to report progress to the community is an important part of their work as interns.
- We will delete the feed syndication from the planet if your membership expires.
The rationale behind this new policy is simple, we want to increase the value of becoming a foundation member. Think of this as the blogging equivalent of rocking an @gnome.org e-mail address.
Update: I have clarified the language behind the deletion of the feed. Someone in the comments thought I was talking about removing their blogs from blogs.gnome.org. This is not the case, if your membership expires your feed won't show up in the Planet, but that's it, if you have a blog in blogs.gnome.org none of your posts will be deleted.
Foundationally yours,
the Planet GNOME editors team.
Silicon Island 
I don’t like that. The planet is our information-platform number one. Removing all non-members just decrease the value of planet gnome instead of increasing the value of the membership.
Gnome is about the community not about the foundation. What’s next? Should we remove access to git for non members as well to make the membership more fancy?
This sounds as one of those classic “let us do *something*” ideas no one should realize.
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We are an in-club these days. You’re free to enter, but you have to have the badge.
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Would it be possible to get a list of all current Planet GNOME blogs. Or at least a list of the ones removed at the end of the three weeks? That way if someone wants to follow that blog specifically it will be easy to find. I may not even know who I enjoy reading because it just all comes as Planet GNOME.
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@Flo,
They just need to apply for membership. No big deal.
@Tim,
Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
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Flo, the foundation *is* the community. The membership is the same people who make things rock in the community. The board is made up of people from the community. The foundation is just the community’s way of handling things you just can’t do with git and bugzilla, like receive and spend money.
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Well, the foundation is a subset of our community. Most people I work with are no members. I personally worked around 30 hours on gnome related stuff this week and I’m not a member of the foundation as well. (But that’s obviously my fault.)
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think kicking some people out of our aggregator is the end of the world. It simply reduces the value of it. Getting different views of our subprojects readers are not directly involved in is what our planet is all about.
Most interesting posts are not about the money or big decisions like the direction we are heading but about design ideas, new features and plans. Stuff that is not only done by foundation members but by people who are supporting our modules.
Reducing the amount of windows in such projects is simply something I wasn’t expecting.
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Sure it’s not a big deal. But it’s another formula to fill out. Not a very exciting task for people who are trying to improve our platform in their free time. 🙂
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I think this is a very good thing. I hope Planet Fedora does the same.
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It takes less time to become a member than it takes to put comments in my blog post. Just saying.
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This seems like a good move to me. It makes both membership in the foundation and presence on the planet more meaningful.
However, I strongly disagree with “We will delete blogs if your membership expires”. I can see how removing the blog from planet or locking access to the GNOME hosted blog (until foundation membership is restored) makes sense but removing the historical posts that very likely contain valuable information seems far too hostile.
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I think Alberto just meant that blogs would be removed from the PGO roster, not that blogs that happen to be on blogs.gnome.org would be removed. I think those are managed by a different team anyway. I happen to think that blogs.gnome.org should also be restricted to members, but I completely agree with you about not deleting previous posts. Just like we don’t remove people’s git commits if they leave.
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in order to have a blog on gnome.org you already need a gnome.org email address – and to get that, you need to be a foundation member.
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last time I vouched for somebody to be a foundation member, it took less than *a day*. the accounts team rocks hard, and if you’re a gnome contributor, getting a foundation membership is incredibly easy – everyone should join.
if you join, you get to vote for the board (very important!), and ask for travel sponsorship for conferences, and get a snazzy @gnome.org address, and a blog on blogs.gnome.org.
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Sorry Jon,
What I meant to say is that the feed will be removed from the planet. No content will be ever removed, just the syndication. I will update the post to clarify this.
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I second this. The community is larger than the Foundation. When I read “planet.gnome.org” I hear “Planet GNOME” which signifies to me that the planet aggregates the World of GNOME, it’s ecosystem. This includes users, developers, evangelists, enthusiasts, administrators, etc. The planet served as a window into the lives and work of people involved with all sectors of GNOME. Many may not have directly made “non-trivial improvements” to the GNOME platform through code submission, translation, documentation, etc. but they certainly made non-trivial contributions to the conversation and to my enjoyment of reading the planet. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a GNOME Foundation aggregate feed rather than change the existing experience of long-time pgo readers? I suppose that this is stick-and-carrot, but the readers are getting the stick.
For my own amusement, (insert joke about GNOME limiting users’ choices again). 🙂
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The existing experience won’t change as long as people apply for membership.
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And so what we feared has come to pass.
The foundation was created because some claimed that the community needed to offer a point of contact to the business world, something more structured than the open, collaborative community of GNOME could provide.
Several of us at the time pointed out that the danger was that the foundation would come to see itself as more important than the community or even as being the community.
That transition is now complete. “Join the foundation or quit the planet.” So much for a project open to a wide, diverse, all inclusive community.
Well, enjoy what you have created, it will be pretty excellent regardless, but this is an end of sorts in the long history of GNOME.
~acuster-at-gnome
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