proposal for the board: planet fedora != fedora people

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 14:39:54 -0400,
  "Paul W. Frields" <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Earlier I remember Mike McGrath had talked about some of the issues we
> had in "growth without scaling" as it pertained to FAS groups.
> Because we have a very self-service group joining system, we have lots
> of new FAS account holders joining groups with no context around them,
> or any idea what they mean, or whether they even need to be in them.
> As a result, there are "join queues" which have a very low signal to
> noise ratio, and it's hard to figure out as a sponsor on which to take
> action.  We certainly want new contributors to be able to join (and be
> approved for) groups easily, but the suggestion was made by someone
> that invitation groups by default make more sense.

I think that most group memberships should be by invitation.
Whenever I request group membership or package co-maintainer status using
the self service pages, I always send an email message to what I think
the correct people or list is explaining my request. This gives them
more context and I think makes it easier to explain why a request was denied
in the cases where that is appropriate.
I could just as easily send the email message asking for membership and
not do the self service part. I'd just have to make sure to include my
fas account name in the message.