On 5/31/21 10:51 PM, Martin Wilck wrote:
On Mo, 2021-05-31 at 14:32 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
openSUSE as an organisation is a famous/notorious for having a "Those who do, decide" mentality and a long history of empowering its contributors.
There is even significant documentation, official [1] and unofficial [2] to that fact that openSUSE does not have steering groups. Period.
We actively advertise ourself as a project as that does not "have technical steering groups or other people who tell us what to do"
... which is exactly what happened here. We were told to move to libera.chat, whether or not we consent, by individuals who happen to be in the channel operator role on freenode.
The "those who do, decide" model works well for technical development (most of the time), but not for possibly controversial policy issues.
If this decision had been made by an elected comittee, there would be at least some sort-of-democratic legitimation behind the move, and users who disagree could vote for different candidates next time.
Well in some ways it was, in that the Board made a decision not to say no we'd rather not have a channel on this network because we'd like to use some other network instead. The board has responsibility for the openSUSE Trademark so its well within our power to say we don't want to have a presence on platform X. So if you want you can blame the board. We could have also said please wait while we have further discussion on the matter but personally once the release engineering team who are our largest users of irc still didn't object then I was ok with the change. But as a board moving to libera.chat was recommended by everyone who has been responsible for making the change and as a board we didn't see a good reason to disagree with them. Personally i'm in a couple of channels on OFTC so i'm well aware of other networks but most channels i'm on were on freenode and have since moved to libera.chat -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B