New member process performance and issues (Fwd: SPI Member application for Filipus Klutiero)

Hi,
On 2015-06-28, I applied for SPI membership. I did not obtain any
followup until 2016-02-03, when I received the forwarded mail.

After such a delay, my interest in SPI was low. I thought that was a big
incident, and felt comforted to think that the processing time for my
application was not representative. I thought my application would now
be processed swiftly.

Yesterday, my application, managed by Martin Zobel-Helas, was finally
processed, and I was invited to vote in the 2016 board election, which
revived my interest in SPI and prompted me to visit its discussion
forums. To my surprise, I could not find any mention of the issue
discovered in February, even checking on spi-general (although there are
a couple of mails titled "New members website / inactive contributing
member cleanup", which, while they apparently do not treat this issue,
seem related). This is why I am hereby forwarding the mail I received in
February, even though I have no idea how many applications were affected.

I rarely apply for membership in a software project, but it was
unprecedented for me to apply to an opaque process like the SPI's
without being requested to do so. I wanted to send a mail to report my
experience, but I now realize that SPI actually has statistics about the
process's performance on https://members.spi-inc.org/stats

These statistics follow:

NC Applicants Pending Email Approval a
NC Members b
Contrib Membership Applications c
Contrib Members d
Application Managers 11

I do not precisely understand what each of these metrics means, but this
would certainly be most relevant for those wondering whether they should
apply for membership. Unfortunately, this page is not accessible when
not logged in. Could this be intentional?

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: SPI Member application for Filipus Klutiero
Date: Wed, 03 Feb 2016 11:03:57 +0000
From: SPI Membership Committee <membership(at)spi-inc(dot)org>
To: chealer(at)gmail(dot)com

Dear Filipus Klutiero,

It has come to our attention that at some point (possibly some time ago)
you application for SPI contributing membership. However due to an issue
in the way the membership site worked it was possible to do this before
you had verified your email address and thus become a non-contributing
member.

This has now been rectified, both to make it clearer when logging in
that email verification is pending and also to prevent a contributing
membership application before that stage is complete. However your
application is still in this limbo state.

Should you wish to proceed with your SPI contributing membership
application please click on the following link to verify your email
address:

https://members.spi-inc.org/verifyemail?emailkey=a808a96634dd9102c7f144ba8e27d5e8

Alternatively go to:

https://members.spi-inc.org/verifyemail

And enter a808a96634dd9102c7f144ba8e27d5e8 as the verification code.

There is no need to resubmit your contributing application itself; once
you have validated your email it will enter the queue of applications
for the membership committee to process.

If you do not wish to proceed with SPI membership you can ignore this
email.

Apologies for the delay getting this issue resolved.

--
The SPI Membership Committee <membership(at)spi-inc(dot)org>