[ board@ ⊂ project@, so removing the former ] On Thu 2021-07-22, Richard Brown wrote:
I think it is rather innaproriate for the Board to be providing dictats on technical matters to openSUSE contributors.
Was the wording in the ticket/minutes ideal? No. Would I have put things differently? Yes. But, as someone else already said: We are humans. Human communications is not perfect. It is prone to diverse understandings. Plus we all make mistakes. How we decide to receive, interpret, and act on things matters as much as how we articulate. Cultures, personalities, language(s), and skills play a role among other factors. That's why at openSUSE Conference last year I referred to the Principle of Charity. For me personally this goes beyond the original scope of philosphy and rhetoric. It's about assuming best intentions. It's about trust. It's about navigating my own shortcomings. And it's about trying to extend the charity that I hope to receive to others. And I wish, for myself and for this community, there was more of that here. That does not mean to accept everything. It does not mean to quell disagreement. It does not mean not to provide feedback. Just the "how" may matter as much as the "what". For example, does feedback like this need to happen on public lists and in such a way? Or wouldn't a note, maybe even an inquiry, to the affected parties be better? (The latter is my usual preference.) Sharing some of my perspective:
I would much rather see such proposals discussed in the approriate public forums (eg Factory list) rather then the Board misusing it's meetings to make decisions of this type and then further abusing its position of trust to insert one of it's members into existing meetings and processes.
"Misusing meetings" and "abusing trust" are fierce phrases which do not reflect my own perception. We had four guests in the board meeting on Monday (Attila, Bittin, Doug, and Maurizio) and I wonder what their take is. I also wonder how the folks on the release engineering meeting this week felt and would be happy to receive feedback directly, to board@ or here. Whatever it is, I'll make sure we take it to heart.
The openSUSE RelEng Team meetings already have Board representation under it's scope as a facilitator of discussions with the community, so it is plainly obvious to me that Axel's addition is stretching beyond that.
I try to attend our release engineering team meetings when I can (which probably has been more often than not in the last year), yet changed the minutes to refer to me as just "Gerald", without a reference to the board. By default I represent myself, then my role (as chair of the board or CTO at SUSE, depending on context) and only then - rarely and usually explicitly - the board as a body. Most meetings at openSUSE should be open to everyone, in particular openSUSE members, most of the time. We recently implemented this for board meetings even, and I am glad we did. There have been good conversations and sharing and more transparancy - definitely a win for the project. (On the board meetings everyone is welcome to raise issues and actively participate. Maybe we'll hit scalability issues at one point, but we'll tackle that when/if it happens.)
Please can I be provided with a list of which members voted for or against this decision?
There was no vote, just a redirection towards the responsible group
(release engineering). Since I had a customer panel "in" South Africa
that morning, I suggested someone else like Simon or Axel to relay.
I would have strongly pushed back against a vote or a board mandate,
and that seemed to be consensus of the group on Monday anyway.
In the hope this provides some color and a thought or two rather
than kick off more of a courtroom style argument, and let's not
forget `cat /etc/motd` on and in and around openSUSE,
Gerald
--
Dr. Gerald Pfeifer