Hi everybody,
as you all know, we have the openSUSE Members, a group of contributors through
their sustained and substantial contributors that are eligible to participate
in elections, have @opensuse.org mail and other perks. We have now about 600
of them, but as you can see[1] in last openSUSE Board elections only 150 of
them voted.
This could mean two things - either most of the members are not interested in
elections or plenty of them are simply no longer around. I guess the truth is
somewhere in middle. This is something we need to know when we take project
wide decisions in order to correctly assess the communities interest in the
topic.
This is a recurring topic that has been discussed at the openSUSE Board Face to
Face meeting last year, oSC 15, and on this list several times over the last
few years. Taking these into consideration, we (in the board) think it would
be a good idea to implement something to help with ensuring our Membership list
accurately reflects our current Membership. I have put together a tool which
attempts to detect an openSUSE Members activity on mailing lists, OBS,
bugzilla, maybe more. This tool will remember when we last saw openSUSE Member
on any of those channels and if they doesn't show for 6 months, we will send
them an e-mail asking whether they still wants to be a member. A response to
that email will automatically count as activity and preserve the Members
status. If there is no response within 30 days of the notification, the Member
will be 'retired' and be considered a 'Member emeritus'. If someone is retired
incorrectly, or a 'Member emeritus' returns to the Project and wants a
restoration of their voting privilege, they will be unretired without question
by the Membership Committee.
There are few implementation details to be worked out, so we don't expect this
to go live overnight but consider this a "statement of intent" and an
explanation of how we expect things to work before we start testing the
process.
====
To answer some of the obvious questions:
Q: Shouldn't we retire inactive members anyway after measuring and evaluating
their activity?
A: No, that would be too hard, too subjective and it could bother people that
we cannot measure automatically. Automatic measurement is just an indicator
that those people are no longer interested, but they might be just working
on project aspects we cannot measure. openSUSE Members are members until
THEY no longer want to be. We believe this system preserves that principle.
Q: Wouldn't it offend active contributors if they will be falsely accused of
not being interested?
A: I hope not. If period will be long enough (6 months) and if we monitor even
mailing lists, people will usually show up somewhere. We intend to word the
'ping' email in a way that is not judgemental, but just makes it clear that
we have failed to automatically find evidence of contribution so want to make
sure they are still interested in remaining a Member.
Q: Doesn't it change the meaning of the openSUSE Member?
A: Not really. So far once you got a membership status, it was forever without
question. Now it would be forever as long as you are interested. No big
change, just a little difference.
Q: What if mail with warning gets lost?
A: If you lose your membership by accident by losing an e-mail, you can still
contact membership committee and as a retired member you will be reinstated
immediately without voting/verification that takes time. And you should fix
your e-mail in connect.opensuse.org in that case ;-)
Q: Will retired members retain their email & IRC cloak perks?
A: No, the intention is that retired members will no longer be eligible for
@opensuse.org email addresses and Freenode IRC cloaks.
[1] https://connect.opensuse.org/pg/polls/read/pluskalm/49480/opensuse-board-el…
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Hello,
good news: after a month of hunting a) spammers and b) server admins,
the needed wiki extensions to prevent and delete wiki spam finally got
installed and the database updated so that those extensions can work.
(Done in the english wiki, the others will follow.)
This means the wiki is editable again :-)
It also means we now have an easy way to block spam, and can mass-delete
existing spam pages.
As every good news, there's also a bit of bad news - the database update
cleared all cache, which means the wiki is terribly slow at the moment.
BTW: If I accidently delete something that was not spam while doing the
mass deletion, please tell me ;-)
For those who are interested in details:
- the Nuke and AbuseFilter extensions were installed
- I just added the first spam filter - let's see how it works out (and
tell me if it accidently produces false positives [1])
- I just started to delete all the spam. If someone has admin
permissions on the english wiki and wants to help, head over to
https://en.opensuse.org/Special:Nuke and enter something like %1_8%
as page title search term. It uses MySQL LIKE syntax, as a regex the
example means .*1.8.* (the "all pages" list will give you more
spam page titles if you sort by creation date)
- If you are interested in helping with AbuseFilter rules, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam/AbuseFilter_examples and
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter#Documentation_and_mana…
for documentation.
If you reply to this mail, please answer only to one list. Cross-posting
the announcement is enough ;-)
Regards,
Christian Boltz
[1] Funnily I was the first victim of the spam filter ;-)
I didn't exclude the 'delete' action on the first attemp. When I
tried to delete pages with spammy title, this was denied because
the page title matched the spam filter ;-)
Lesson learned: I need to exclude the 'delete' action from the filter ;-)
--
For Geralds problem "rpm -e digikam-doc" would be the solution: nobody
is going to read 19.3MB of documentation anyway, given that people do
not even read short README's :-P [Stefan Seyfried in opensuse-factory]
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Hi all,
Today, March 22, we will have an organizing meeting for the openSUSE
Conference on the opensuse-project channel at 1700 UTC. I will have the
agenda ready for the meeting:
The topics we will discuss today are:
Social events Planning
Entertainment Planning
Marketing Status
Keynote Status
Trello Cards
Schedule
Outreach/Education Status
Volunteer Tasks
Equipment update
Regards,
Doug
Hello,
As the title says, any1 attending GNOME Asia summit next month at Delhi?
Summit URL = http://2016.gnome.asia/
Regards,
Amey.
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Hi,
I wanted to save an edited wiki page and got the error:
Database error
A database query error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software.
This occured on several sections of the Wiki-page.
Any known issue at the moment?
Happy easter
Axel
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For those who may be trying to organize a Free/Libre Open Source
Software (FLOSS) project, this presentation by a member of a some-what
successful commercial enterprise might be an opportunity to compare
and contrast their ideas:
Spotify Engineering Culture part 1 (Agile Enterprise Transition with
Scrum and Kanban)
https://youtu.be/Mpsn3WaI_4k
Spotify Engineering Culture part 2 (Agile Enterprise Transition with
Scrum and Kanban)
https://youtu.be/X3rGdmoTjDc
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openSUSE Face to Face Board Meeting 2016 Minutes 18th-20th March
Present:
Richard Brown - Chair
Michal Hrušecký
Kostas Koudaras
Tomas Chvatal
Gertjan Lettink
Bryan Lunduke - Extra special thanks goes to Bryan for attending
via video conference at ridiculous hours in his local timezone after
urgent personal matters kept him from attending the meeting in person.
As this years Board Meeting Minutes are so long, they are split into 3 sections
Meetings - Covering the meetings the Board had with various SUSE
executives, managers, and engineers.
General - Covering the general agenda items/day-to-day issues
Strategy - Covering the 'big picture' issues the Board discussed
This email is Part 2, containing general agenda items
Part 1 is available
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2016-03/msg00038.html
= General =
== Desktops ==
Board discussed the state of the various desktops in openSUSE.
Improving the selection screen to better reflect the actual nature of
our distributions is something we certainly want to see.
AI: Board to discuss some ideas with our various Desktop Teams
== Membership Tidy ==
Board discussed it's ongoing efforts to tidy up the membership list.
We have plenty of members that might not be around anymore. From
previous discussions we have a draft of what we want to do and it was
heavilly discussed over and over. So we will move to the
implementation. Current plan is to do just a small changes that were
already discussed (announcement pending), there might be a room for
bigger changes and cleaning up the rules, but that would need mebers
agreement. We should also remove inactive members of membership
comittee. Together with retiring connect.openuse.org we probably can
have some space to make membership management easier and faster.
AI: Tomas should investigate Helios voting system for openSUSE
AI: Michal to draft email about inactive members
AI: Michal to start with tooling and kickstart the process of retiring
inactive members according to the proposal sent
AI: Michal is retiring connect.opensuse.org and doing the Membership tooling
== Mailinglist Moderation ==
Board discussed concerns regarding some behaviour of a few individuals
on the mailinglists.
We recognise that some misbehaviour requires fast action. Agreed that
any one Board member can act on behalf of the Board.
When behaviour is not inline with the Guiding Principles the Board
agreed a principle of 1 private warning followed by a Ban
== Sponsorships ==
Conference in Albania asked for support, but as no person is going
there from openSUSE, we are not providing money.
openSUSE only sponsors events where openSUSE can attend.
We decided to become Platinum Sponsors to Greek FOSSCOMM- Greekos will
be attending
We discussed updating the sponshorship document for people interested
in sponsoring our Project in order to better guide what to do and what
optons are available to become openSUSE sponsor.
AI: Kostas will take care of the Negotiation regarding FOSSCOMM
AI: Board to put together a Sponsorship policy document
== Copyright ==
Copyright requests often get lost of spam, hoping the proposed new
@opensuse mail system will be better with spam
T-systems requested permission to use openSUSE on their new Open
Telekon Cloud - Approved
AI: Richard to review/tune up filtering in current system so copyright
requests don't get lost.
== Maintainer tidy up ==
Board discussed OBS state of inactive maintainers.
With the members cleanup prepared we want to clean this up too
It's very important to new and existing contributors alike that it's
easy to identify who is responsible for which package, or which
packages are low on active maintainers.
Technically we want maintainer tidy-up like the home: repositories cleanup
AI: Tomas will talk with Craig about OBS team preparing the code for this
== Treasurer ==
Board wants to reduce it's time spent worrying about money,
sponsorship, and TSP related matters. The Board's role is meant to be
more focused on the actual immediate and long term issues impacting
the Project as a whole, and the details of money matters is quite
often a distraction from these.
The board agreed to create a openSUSE position called Treasurer.
They will be a non-voting board member appointed by the Board.
Responsibilities of the Treasurer:
Money
Sponsorships
Event
Merchandising materials
TSP
Treasurer must provide regular reports to the Board and thus is
expected to attend all Board meetings where the above responsibilities
are discussed
As a Board appointee, any future Board is expected to confirm their
choice of Treasurer in their first meeting after being elected
This Board has appointed Andrew Waffaa to be the current Treasurer,
effective immediately
AI: board should add treasurer to board ML and create
treasurer(a)opensuse.org mail alias
AI: Board to announce it to Project
AI: Board to put stuff on wiki regarding rules/scope
== Kickstarter ==
With the sponsorship document updated we could provide kickstarter
option for community to sponsor hadware.
This should aim to please most people requesting separate foundation,
because even small donations will be allowed to flow in.
AI: Tomas will talk with Andrew and Marketing teams on how to do this
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Gents,
quite sad to hear that SUSE Studio drops openSUSE 13.1!
As 13.1 is Evergreen AND the ast long-term 32bit openSUSE its worth keeping
it! Sure, we have 13.2 at the start, but the 13.2 Studio template always
caused more trouble than the 13.1 version....
Can we do something from the project side to keep 13.1?
Cheers
Axel
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openSUSE Face to Face Board Meeting 2016 Minutes 18th-20th March
Present:
Richard Brown - Chair
Michal Hrušecký
Kostas Koudaras
Tomas Chvatal
Gertjan Lettink
Bryan Lunduke - Extra special thanks goes to Bryan for attending
via video conference at ridiculous hours in his local timezone after
urgent personal matters kept him from attending the meeting in person.
As this years Board Meeting Minutes are so long, they are split into 3 sections
Meetings - Covering the meetings the Board had with various SUSE
executives, managers, and engineers.
General - Covering the general agenda items/day-to-day issues
Strategy - Covering the 'big picture' issues the Board discussed
This email is Part 3, containing 'big picture' strategy issues discussed
Part 2 is available
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2016-03/msg00039.html
Part 1 is available
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2016-03/msg00038.html
= Strategy =
== Improve Visibility ==
Obviously, we want to improve the visibility of the openSUSE Project.
We have great distributions, great tools, and great technologies, and
we want them to be adopted by as many people and other projects as
possible.
We also want to be a natural choice for new contributors and new
projects to come to openSUSE, work with us, and host their projects
with us.
=== SUSE ===
SUSE is our closest, largest, partner. We have strong practical ties
with them, but that does not mean we can forget about things such as
regular clear communication and 'internal marketing'
SUSE are working on a number of exciting new things, and it's
important that internally openSUSE is seen as a natural home for
SUSE's open source contributions.
Working closely together also should enable SUSE's corporate marketing
experts to help spread the good word about all the awesome stuff the
openSUSE Project is doing
AI: Bryan to investigate the possibility of Doug being invited to
Weekly team meetings for SUSE Corporate Communications
AI: Bryan to drive ensuring openSUSE is well integrated with SUSE's
ongoing marketing.
=== Outreach ===
There's no point only targeting our existing contributors and partners
like SUSE. Any open source project needs new people and with new
people comes new ideas, new solutions, and new exciting projects for
people to hack on
A huge challenge for new contributors and projects is understanding
what is available
- Who is the openSUSE Project?
- What services do we provide?
- Where do I go to get involved?
- How do I get started?
These are questions which are _key_ to have simple, clear, easy to
find answers to
CALL FOR HELP: The Board wants to see getting started guides for
- New Users
- New Contributors
- New Projects - to encourage other projects to come use openSUSE as
their home
to answer the above questions. These should be simple, clear, and
relatively short. The produced guides should be easily usable on a
wiki, the website, on flyers at conferences, short blog posts..we want
to be able to spread them _everywhere_
The guides for new Contributors and new Projects are considered a
Priority by the board - to use a football related quote "There is no
point having fans, if you don't have your 11 on the pitch to play for
them"
AI: Board intends to create a skeleton of the above guides to help
bootstrap this idea, and will drive this, but the Board is keen to see
if anyone from the community dives in and gets to work on this
immediately.
=== Other Projects ===
While openSUSE is keen to see other projects call the openSUSE Project
it's home, we recognise that it's not viable for many, especially
those larger ones with their own established communities
In cases like this the Board wants to encourage strong relationships
with such Projects, and seek out partnerships and other arrangements
with such Projects for the benefit of all involved
Examples include ownCloud and Kolab, where we believe openSUSE is in a
perfect position to offer tools, community, and a solid environment
for these projects to use as a default or recommended platform for
their users
AI: Bryan to arrange information exploratory discussions
=== Hardware vendors ===
Having hardware sponsors and partners is nice but is hard. Solid
hardware support requires the hardware to be available and in the
hands of the right contributors to make it happen
Otherwise there is no way how to support special hardware without the
things available for testing.
However, we do have some relationships which are happening, and we
want to highlight those who do stuff with us, such as
- Soft Iron are shipping 64-bit ARM servers with openSUSE Tumbleweed as standard
- Fujitsu offer openSUSE Tumbleweed to thier customers who want a
Linux option on their Desktop & Server Hardware
- Epson have some printers using openSUSE and YaST
- Open Mainframe are investigating the possibility of building an
openSUSE distribution for s390x
== Reform and Remove Mess ==
Improving viability and reaching out to new areas is all well and
good, but we need to make sure the project internals are tidy, clear,
and easy to use
Board discussed the state of many infrastructure and project policies
and processes.
We agreed a principle of, when something is imperfect, we Reform (aka
improve) or Remove it.
Services identified to be removed or reformed:
- Software.o.o:
1) Media download needs to be easier, prefferable static page
2) package search adds too much mess to the installed systems.
Invalid repos should not be distributed by 1-click installs
3) somehow redesign and reduce confusion to ensure that users
do not end up with 80+ additional repos.
- Wiki:
1) In order to fix the wiki quickly ,the board approved the
idea of deploying the latest version of mediawiki on a new server
without branding
2) branding can always be redone later
- Blogs/Planet:
1) Only a handful of people use Planet, but it takes a lot of
resources to keep it running. We want to shut it down, and encourage
it's users move to their own blogs, which will then be aggregated on
planet.opensuse.org
2) Improve planet.opensuse.org. Find a maintainer, use a clean
upstream OSS soltion if possible
AI: Kostas to contact the few Lizards bloggers to discuss
their migration options
- News.o.o:
1) Wordpress consumes too many resources and poses too many
security risks
2) Replace with something lightweight
AI: Richard talk with Douglas about this
- i18n.o.o:
Translations site is being migrated to l10n.o.o as we speak
and i18n will be killed including
the svn prior Leap 42.2 release.
- Legal layout of Board/membership:
The current layout of the Board Election Rules, Membership
Rules, and such are sometimes confusing and missing some details
The documents will be updated and restructured to be more clear
This should set the framework for discussing any reforms of
the Membership process once the Membership tidy-up is complete
AI: board - get Infra team to provide list of services we have, soon
to help with this endevour
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