The FinOps Foundation's new 'Access Policy' may exclude you

General
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On Saturday 2 March I discovered I no longer had access to the FinOps Foundation’s slack channel, when notified by Mark Butcher (he had also been booted out). Initially, we both assumed that this was because we had allowed our Practitioner Certification to expire, so Mark re-took the exam (and passed, of course). Further investigation revealed that Bhups Hirani, Ethan Sumner, Idaliz Baez and all those working for Capgemini still retained access to the slack channel, despite working for what the Foundation terms ‘non-member vendors’.

Keen to understand the reasons behind this move, I emailed JR to ask, ‘why me’?

I have re-printed JR’s reply in full here:

Hi Mike,

This update is going out in tranches as we are manually reviewing the list due to the possibility of role and company changes. All non-member vendors will be subject to the same terms. The Foundation is applying consistent rules to all. If you see cases of the policy being inconsistent, please let us know so we can investigate.

In terms of staying involved: we hope you consider joining the Foundation as a vendor member, as many others have. All are welcome under the same terms.

If you choose not to formally join the FinOps Foundation, there’s still a lot you can do. As a non-member vendor, you’re currently categorized as a “Supporter”. Supporters still can attend our monthly virtual summits, regional community-led meetups (venue dependent), participate in training/certification and attend events like FinOps X as ‘non-member vendors’ (based on role/availability).

Specific details can be found at the bottom of the page:

J.R.

So - the bottom line is - If you’re not categorised by the Foundation as a ‘practitioner’ and you don’t work for an organisation that pays the Foundation to be categroised as a ‘member vendor’ then you are just a ‘Supporter’. You don’t have access to the slack channel, you cannot be involved in any of the WGs or SIGs and you may or may not get to attend events (which, by the way, they will charge you for)

So, although I am now a ‘Supporter’ I need to thing about how supportive I want to be.

Mike

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Holy crap. So Practitioner and payer only.

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Ahh so this is the detail I was missing; it did not impact me but I, and others, did notice many folks and names are no longer there…

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Happened to me as well.

I like the idea of the sales-pitch free community, and I’ve refrained from doing any business development on their Slack, so I hope they might change their access policies based not only on your job title but also how you behave. In the old days of IRC channels, admins would typically first kick anyone misbehaving, and then ban if it happened again.

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I don’t see any signs of a change of heart, Eric. I think we have to accept that, after a couple of years of reducing consultants’ access to F2, they finally decided that it was ‘pay to be a member or you’re not a member’ policy for all those who they do not class as ‘practitioners’