Introduction
The Membership Committee receives applications from all over from GNOME contributors who should be part of the Foundation. The details regarding membership are at: http://foundation.gnome.org/membership/. The fun bit happens at the backend.
What you see
Once the form at http://foundation.gnome.org/membership/application.php is filled up by the applicant, the application goes into an RT Queue. The RT is at http://www.gnome.org/rt3/index.html. At this point you might just like to stop and read up a bit about RT - all the things you wanted to know about the RT but did not know where to read are collected here: http://wiki.bestpractical.com/.
If you are part of the Membership Committee then you ought to have an RT login by now (if you don't then hop along to http://live.gnome.org/Sysadmin/RequestTracker) from the http://live.gnome.org/Sysadmin team. The members of the Sysadmin team also hover around on #sysadmin on (irc://irc.gimp.org)
And what actually happens
This is the place where we describe how you move ahead and plunge into processing applications once you have a RT login and are all eager to begin.
The WorkFlow is as follows:
* Login to RT via http://www.gnome.org/rt3/index.html
* Assign a ticket to yourself by clicking on Take thus ensuring that others also accidentally don't take the same ticket
* Read through the ticket - this is important since not all tickets are having complete information and it might be appropriate to respond accordingly to the ticket-at-hand
* Click on Open to begin working on the ticket
* Put the e-mail addressess whom you want to send the response to in the Cc: field with comma separation between the e-mail addresses
* Put in your response above the original mail (which will be included in fully quoted format)
* Trim away the original mail (it is already there in the ticket and the details would not be required by the contacts)
* Send the response via the RT on its way
Note 1: You can also use the ticket to put in Comments which are not sent to the requestors but might come of use later on
Note 2: The current template being used to ask contacts for details about applicants is as below (from MembershipCommittee/FormLetters):
Dear <insert_name_of_contact>, The GNOME foundation membership committee needs more information to process the application of <insert_name_of_applicant>. Since the applicant has listed you as the primary contact, the committee would like you to list the contributions that <insert_name_of_applicant> has made for the GNOME community in recent times. Your input will be greatly appreciated to help us to make a fair and informed decision in the granting or denying the applicant as a foundation member. At your service, The GNOME Foundation Membership Committee
Note 3: Till the time the application is Resolved it is suggested that you keep the ticket status as Open
