What should be our membership and fee structures?
Oasis is the international NLP community to Explore, Exchange and Inspire.
What are your views on an open-source type of membership model compared to a more traditional one? Should we ask a membership fee or should we privilege the voluntary contributions? Should we restrict the membership in size, geographic locations, level of expertise or should we keep it open to anyone who has an interest in NLP and in contributing to our mission?
Membership structure
I prefer to keep the community very open and I would privilege voluntary contributions where there is a need for them. I believe the only requirement should be that we follow the guiding principles and code of conduct as described in the "About Oasis" section.
I have been a member of many traditional membership associations. The system works well if you need a formal type of structure with a defined leadership (board).
For this community, I believe we are looking to extend the spirit of NLPU where everything is much more loose and organic (sometimes chaotic), where you may not always know what's going to happen next but where the learning you get is empowering. You learn to let go, accept, be curious and grow.
I believe everyone has a contribution and every contribution is valuable whether you are a newbie at NLP or one of the masters.
I also believe that self-leadership is something we should all look to develop and that an organic structure makes self-leadership even more of a necessity.
There is, I believe, a form of natural selection that occurs when people are not behaving according to the values and principles held high by a community.
That is what I am looking for in Oasis.
What do you think?
Dott