openSUSE talk:Membership officials

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Changing the way openSUSE Membership is managed

Early Planning and some Experiments are currently underway.

Interested openSUSE Members are encouraged to participate in the Planning and then the Deployment of the solution.

Starting point

Since the beginning, probably, the Membership for openSUSE have been setup through a platform named "connect" that initially aimed to be an openSUSE social media. This did not work out as well as desired and the platform was nearly abandoned, except for the tie-in to Membership database, Membership applications, and Membership verification.

Starting from 20 Feb 2019 ([1]) Alex Christoph raised the problem that this platform is now excessively spammed. This issue had been raised earlier by the 2018-2019 openSUSE Board Elections Committee when trying to verify Candidates and Voter Eligibility.

This started a discussion on the way Membership is managed by openSUSE

Status at February 23, 2019

On Feb 23, 2019, jdd made a summary of the discussion. Current state is listed below:

Solution needs to fulfill the following:

  • Manage a Membership database with identification, allowing Members to check their data, control their own data, and keep it safe. The system must be Secure and should be under full control of openSUSE, preferably on openSUSE infrastructure;
  • Manage a way to allow people to request Membership, to automatically forward the request to the Membership Committee, and to respond to the applicants with the result, and;
  • Move/Port the present database to the new solution.

Actually, there are currently only 446 openSUSE Members, up by about 12% since last spring.

Currently Identified Volunteers

Confirmation is needed on this list.

Did you get missed, or is your information correct?

Any additions or corrections here, you can log in using your openSUSE Member login and add or correct your information, or else please contact jdd to make the change for you.

List is in no special order:

  • jdd: Team Leader/Point Man (galette and more)
  • lcp (Stasiek): I am working on a simple rails application that allows users to be assigned to teams, join teams, leave teams, message entire teams (via email, disable-able) and write their profiles and contributions to describe what they are doing in openSUSE. Members would be a team, so they would be stored properly, and would have ability to request Membership, complete with the list of contributions.
  • Christian Boltz aka cboltz: database and phpMyAdmin
  • Ish Sookun
  • Edwin Zakaria aka medwinz
  • Lars Vogdt
  • Carlos E. R. aka robin.listas: Anti-Spam Admin
  • Stefan Seyfried: Anti-Spam Admin
  • Michael Ströder (Use Æ-DIR instead of FreeIPA)

Solution proposed are

Solution Must Be Open Source:

  • lcp (Stasiek) is proposing noggin and ipsilon. noggin is an account system, ipsilon is identity provider. noggin basically allows for sso for the infra overall. ipsilon allows us to integrate that account system into infra. It would basically be breaking with freeipa and going somewhere else.
  • mysql, pqsql, or sqlite, or similar, with web forms and SSI, perhaps using phpmyadmin (could be tied into the Wiki, f.e.), which would include a link from the Membership Wiki page to a secure web form the applicant can fill in.
  1. When they fill in the form and hit send, it would then forward the request and information to the Membership Committee. The Membership Committee would not have to do any input in the form, except to just tick off a field or fields indicating whether or not the applicant qualifies.
  2. When the Committee then hits send, the answer about the result would be forwarded to the applicant. If qualified, the information would then automatically insert into the Membership database.
  3. The database would need to be set up so Members can securely -- through a form -- check and correct their information as it changes. Ideally, Members should be allowed to select most of what information is available to the general public, what additional information is available to other openSUSE Members who view the page, and what additional personal information is available only to the Admins, the Membership Committee, and the Elections Committee.

probably opensource (to check):

Updates to Progress Requested: State of Experiments

Volunteers have not been reporting progress lately. Please do so.

openSUSE Infra related

  • Heroes team is ready to give a Virtual machine, but we have to find a team to manage it completely. Experiments are better done on personal hardware.

I, jdd, can also help in a limited way, but this depends on the solution that is finally chosen. I'm a bit familiar with galette. I also know how to setup Apache and apache virtual servers.

Other volunteers are needed, prefer more experience if possible (although I am sure we will get some good guidance at the start from our Heroes and Admins).

Galette

Galette is a membership management program I (jdd) use regularly to manage my Linux User Group membership. One can subscribe, and an admin can give him the position. A test session is here try it.

dummy test

There is a Members Import Page for the Admins:

http://dodin.org/galette/webroot/import/model

import cvs page

This allows the Admins to perform mass imports of subscribers.

Communication

  • the opensuse-project mailing list is presently used but the thread(s) is pretty long and intimidating
  • this wiki page and any sub-page you may create