openSUSE Project February 2018

project@lists.opensuse.org

26 participants
9 discussions

Could any of the openSUSE Committers add me to github openSUSE group

by Liang Yan

Hello, My name is Liang, and I am working on virtualization team, and we have a QEMU repo under openSUSE now. Could anyone invite me to join openSUSE group, and two of my colleagues if possible, :) really appreciate it. Liang Yan: lyan(a)suse.com Lin Ma: lma(a)suse.com Fei Li: fli(a)suse.com Thanks, Liang -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

2 years, 7 months

Proposal: Reforming openSUSE Membership To Better Reflect Our Ethos

by Richard Brown

Hi Project, The Board has been considering the state of the current openSUSE Membership system and it's role in the Project's governance. For those who are unaware, openSUSE Members are the individuals who have voting rights in openSUSE Board elections, so directly elect 5 out of the 6 people in the projects senior conflict resolution & leadership body. Currently, to become a member, an openSUSE contributor must first contribute to the Project. After contributing in a "sustained and substantial" manner, they can Apply to become a member. This application requires the applicant to fill in the 'Contributions' section in their connect.opensuse.org profile and applying to the openSUSE Members group. A Membership committee then reviews those applications, confirms whether or not the claimed contributions are valid and meet the criteria of "sustained and substantial". This requires that the balance of votes of the committee reaches at least 3 positive votes. (eg. 4 positive votes and 1 negative vote results in the Applicant being approved. 5 positive votes and 3 negative votes results in the Applicant not approved). Approved members then receive @opensuse.org email addresses and IRC cloaks, and are eligible to run in openSUSE Board elections. Besides that, an openSUSE Member really isn't any different from any other contributor - we're not a project where you need to be a Member in order to be able to contribute to the Project in any meaningful way. In addition to the above, openSUSE Members have the capability of recalling the Board, causing a re-election of the Board if 20% of the membership believe they are not correctly being served by their current Board. Members remain members until they no longer wish to be members. Membership lapsing used to be entirely on a voluntary basis. Recently we have experimented with using bots to identify activity of Members. If a member is no longer visibly active in the Project in any way, we have recently begun repeatedly asking (using the contact details available) whether they wish to remain a member. Any answer, guarantees that membership remains. Failure to answer removes that contributor's status as an openSUSE Member. It can be re-instated at any time upon request. So, that is the status quo, why has the Board been thinking about this? Well, your Board collectively feels that this system currently has a number of practical and philosophical flaws, which we would like to see addressed by the Project. The primary issue of concern is the one which led to the 'activity check' and 'ask if users want to remain a Member, if no activity detected' approach introduced over the last year. The Board feels it's really important that it is accountable to the Project. In it's primary role as arbitrators of disputes in the Project, or as decision-makers of last resort, it's capability to act effectively in that role is compromised if it is perceived to not represent the Project at large. That is why we have that rule that 20% of the Members can recall the Board. It's designed to be so low, so the Board can be seen to be so directly accountable to the Membership (and by proxy, the Project at large). Before we have the 'activity check', our Membership list included a great deal of former contributors who had no longer any interest in the Project. This made reaching this 20% threshold harder and harder, undermining the whole point of that low threshold. The removal of Members who are no longer part of the Project has made it easier for the Membership to recall the Board. But the Board feels this is not enough. Over the years, especially recent ones, openSUSE has appealed to a new generation of contributors. Our distributions are significantly larger than ever before, moving at a pace of hundreds of changes a week. openSUSE is home to a growing family of sub-projects, beyond just Linux distributions. openSUSE has strong contribution bases in more and more countries, as demonstrated by examples like our openSUSE Asia summits. And yet, the number of openSUSE Members remains at best relatively static, or shrinking as a result of the 'activity check'. In short, there is a strong case to be made that the Membership scheme, in it's current form, can not possibly reflect the Project at large. The Board have identified a number of practical reasons for this stagnation in the membership scheme. 1) Connect is a pain to use - It's unmaintained, and our openSUSE Heroes infra team very much want to stop running the server. 2) Connect is a REAL pain to use - a significant percentage of membership requests do not include any claimed contributions, so the committee cannot verify those contributions and have no choice but to reject them. 3) Connect is an ABSOLUTE pain to use - the membership committee never get notified when there is new application, meaning that applications can often linger for weeks or months before enough vote positively or negatively to accept an application. 4) Connect is an UNGODLY pain to use - anyone reapplying for membership immediately shows up the committees queue with their previous voting score - which has on way too many occasions led to instant-deapproval when the committee didn't realise the person was applying for a second time. (I'm pretty sure this even happened to me, back in the day). We COULD just fix connect to address the problems above, but they've been known for a long while and no contributor has stepped up to fix them. Even if they were resolved, would remain logistical issues 1) The Membership committee, by design has to a small group of trusted individuals. With the Project as diverse as it is now, it's practically impossible for that small group to have an oversight of contributions across the whole Project. This makes it very hard for them to judge whether the contributions are "sustained and substantial" under the current system. 2) Even with notifications addressing the fact the committee do not know when applications are waiting, the "+3 on balance" requirement often means that an application can be deadlocked by just a few individuals voting down a potential member. "Sustained and Substantial" is a subjective measurement, which is always going to lead to differences of opinions. It's not all about practicalities, like I said, the Board have identified a number of philosophical problems with the Membership scheme in it's current form also As a project, we generally operate with a mindset of 'those that do, decide'. Committees, permission, and other such obstacles, are things we actively avoid when establishing processes in the Project. We have a strong ethos of empowering anyone to contribute and not having barriers to entry. The Board currently feels the Membership scheme in it's current form runs counter to this mindset and ultimately undermines it. No matter how well meaning the individuals in the committee are, ultimately some committee currently decides if your contributions are 'good enough' to be a Member. We'll let a random person off the street contribute patches to core parts of our software, but they're not good enough to have an opinion on how the project is led? We're not great at putting down our collective philosophy, but I think it's not too bold to say that it's not a very "openSUSE" way of thinking. (For more of my thoughts on how our ethos and "those that do, decide" makes us special, you can watch my FOSDEM talk from last weekend [1]) The Board would therefore like to propose a much streamlined Membership scheme for the future. The structure we propose would be something like: * openSUSE Members will retain all of the rights, benefits, and responsibilities they do today (Voting, Emails/Cloaks Recalling the Board, etc) * Any openSUSE contributor can apply to be a Member * The threshold for Membership will be reduced from "sustained and substantial contribution" to "a contribution and a desire to be a Member" (ie. not every contributor should feel compelled to engage with the Project in this way). * If the contribution can be automatically verified, they will automatically become a Member. (New tooling here will be required, but for example, a quick parse of the public mailinglists would be able to verify a good number of contributions, be they through bug reporting, package contributions, or support on the mailinglists) * If they cannot be automatically verified, they need to be manually verified, but only require a single +1 vote from the Membership committee. * Once becoming a Member, they can remain a member as long as they have an interest in the Project. - If ongoing contributions cease or the contributions cannot be automatically detected, Members will be asked by a bot if they wish to remain a Member. Obviously this new system has some risks which the old system does not. In theory "bad actors" could sign up to become openSUSE members, and collectively sway Board elections and such to install inappropriate people into the Board. The Board understands this was a fear which was a major consideration leading to the original structure and requirement for "sustained and substantial" contributions. However, the Board feels this is an unlikely risk in this day and age. Even if that risk is realised, it should be sufficiently mitigated by boards rule preventing 40% of Board members being employed by the same company. Worse case, our healthier Membership scheme could trigger a re-election if 20% of the Membership collectively feel things are going in the wrong direction. So on balance we feel this is the best way forward to ensure openSUSE Membership is easy, engaging, and enables the Membership to more accurately reflect the Project as a whole. Given the nature of this change, the Board would like the feedback and consensus of the Project as a whole. If the overwhelming responses to this post is approval of this approach, then we'd like to see the Project start implementing it post-haste, possibly even before the upcoming next election. However, of course, if there is a significant debate to be had, the right way of resolving this might be a vote by the current Membership - this is one of the reasons why this proposal is announced today; After the election problems we had with connect.opensuse.org last year the Board wanted to be sure we had an alternative voting platform available if we need it. Our awesome openSUSE Heroes have just completed confidence tests of one such system, so if we need it, it's available. Thanks and have a lot of fun, Richard Brown on behalf of the openSUSE Board {Christian Boltz, Richard Brown, Tomas Chvatal, Sarah Julia Kriesch, Gertjan Lettink, Bryan Lunduke} [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5YKBS-KUe8 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

2 years, 9 months

openSUSE mini-summit @ LinuxFest NW

by Carl Symons

Hello openSUSE community You are invited to an openSUSE mini-summit on April 29, 2018 in Bellingham, Washington, USA. The mini-summit will be held in conjunction with LinuxFest Northwest [1], the original grassroots FOSSfest, now in its 19th year. LFNW is free to participate, thanks to generous sponsors and a long-time relationship with Bellingham Technical College. It is low-key and family-inclusive. LFNW will be packed with presentations and exhibits on the latest FOSS technologies. It will feature well-known contributors and projects in a casual environment. Most of the time, the openSUSE Community works and interacts on-line by email, chat, forums and mailing lists. The openSUSE mini-summit is a way to get together in person in order to meet people, ask and answer questions, and build strong social connections. It is a community gathering to discuss ideas and work on projects that benefit openSUSE: its users, its contributors, and its standing as a premier Linux distribution. The openSUSE mini-summit@LFNW is listed at events.opensuse.org (oSMS). But there's no content yet. The organizers have some ideas; we want yours. What are your suggestions for the openSUSE mini-summit? Carl Symons on behalf of: James Mason, SUSE Senior Software Engineer/LFNW organizer Doug DeMaio, everything openSUSE [1] linuxfestnorthwest.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

2 years, 9 months

Fwd: [opensuse-project] Proposal: Reforming openSUSE Membership To Better Reflect Our Ethos

by Ana Martínez

2018-02-10 18:06 GMT+01:00 Richard Brown <RBrownCCB(a)opensuse.org>: Hi, What a long email > Over the years, especially recent ones, openSUSE has appealed to a new > generation of contributors. What that exactly means? > * Any openSUSE contributor can apply to be a Member > * The threshold for Membership will be reduced from "sustained and > substantial contribution" to "a contribution and a desire to be a > Member" (ie. not every contributor should feel compelled to engage > with the Project in this way). Doesn't applying already mean that someone has the desire to become a member? > * If the contribution can be automatically verified, they will > automatically become a Member. (New tooling here will be required, but > for example, a quick parse of the public mailinglists would be able to > verify a good number of contributions, be they through bug reporting, > package contributions, or support on the mailinglists) > > * If they cannot be automatically verified, they need to be manually > verified, but only require a single +1 vote from the Membership > committee. Does that also mean that the time for an application to be accepted will be decreased? It takes tooo long now. Who are the members of the Membership committee and how is it elected? > * Once becoming a Member, they can remain a member as long as they > have an interest in the Project. - If ongoing contributions cease or > the contributions cannot be automatically detected, Members will be > asked by a bot if they wish to remain a Member. This will mean that if a member doesn't contribute at all in 10 years, but he answers to the bot, he will keep being a member, right? This doesn't much really well with "those that do, decide", but more with "those that did in the past, still decide". I personally think that it someone didn't contribute at all for a long time, he is also not interested any more, even if he answer to a bot. Won't this leed to the same problem? I mean to reach the 20% threshold, or is it going to be removed? > So on balance we feel this is the best way forward to ensure openSUSE > Membership is easy, engaging, and enables the Membership to more > accurately reflect the Project as a whole. > > Given the nature of this change, the Board would like the feedback and > consensus of the Project as a whole. I like the proposed change. Allowing people who contribute to decide, even if the contribution is small, is also a way to value their contributions. And it seems this will reduce the time that takes to accept an application as well. The only part I am not sure about is the fact that once someone become a Member, he can keep being a member for ever without contributing any more. But if I understood it correctly, this is already the case without the change. Regards, Ana -- Ana María Martínez Gómez http://anamaria.martinezgomez.name -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

2 years, 9 months

FOSS Backstage in Berlin

by ddemaio

Hi all, If you are interested in submitting a talk for FOSS Backstage <https://foss-backstage.de/> in Berlin, please let me know. It will be June 13 - 14. https://foss-backstage.de/call-papers The organizer reached out to us to see if anybody from openSUSE would be willing to provide a talk. v/r Doug

2 years, 9 months

Hotels for openSUSE Conference

by ddemaio

Hi all, You might have seen my article about hotels in Prague for the openSUSE Conference - https://news.opensuse.org/2018/02/07/where-to-stay-getting-around-prague-fo… Prague will be super busy during the conference this year, so I recommend booking a hotel sooner rather than later. I will add the hotels below to the list on events.opensuse.org. v/r Doug Please see the offer available from several hotels. *Wenceslas Square*** *(*Adresa <https://www.google.cz/search?rls=ig&q=wenceslas+square+hotel+adresa&stick=H…>:*Mezibranská 1450/13, 110 00 Nové Město,www.wenceslassquare.cz/ <http://www.wenceslassquare.cz/>) Price offer: sgl: 110€ including BRK and VAT dbl: 120€ including BRK and VAT 10 rooms available Adler hotel****(Adresa <https://www.google.cz/search?sa=G&rls=ig&q=hotel+adler+adresa&stick=H4sIAAA…>:*V Jirchářích 153/13, 110 00 Nově Město-Nové Město,www.hoteladler.cz/ <http://www.hoteladler.cz/>) Price offer: sgl: 110€ Including BRK and VAT dbl: 120€ Including BRK and VAT 20 rooms available, but needs to be confirmed till 28.02.2018. Some travel agency have option there for these rooms *Metropolitan Old Town Square**** *(Adresa <https://www.google.cz/search?rls=ig&q=hotel+rubicon+old+town+adresa&stick=H…>:*Haštalská 371/20, 110 00 Staré Město,http://www.hotelmetropolitan.cz/) Price offer: sgl: 130€ including BRK and VAT dbl: 150€ including BRK and VAT 15 rooms available Josephine Old Town Square**** *(Adresa <https://www.google.cz/search?sa=G&rls=ig&q=josephine+old+town+square+hotel+…>:*Týn 636 / 9, 110 00 Staré Město,http://www.josephinehotel.cz/) Price offer: sgl: 180€ including VAT and BRK dbl: 200€ Including VAT and BRK 10 rooms available The sales person would like to get a feedback if these rooms or at least some of them are something we are looking for and this will be in the reservation system kept as “option” and it would be available for the attendees till 20^th of April 18.

2 years, 9 months

SA mirror error

by Ish Sookun

Hi folks, I'm getting the following error with the South African [1] mirror. File '/suse/setup/descr/appdata-icons.tar.gz' not found on medium 'http://opensuse.mirror.ac.za/tumbleweed/repo/oss/' Abort, retry, ignore? [a/r/i/...? shows all options] (a): The mentioned file [2] is missing. Can someone point to where I should report mirror issues? Regards, Ish Sookun [1] http://opensuse.mirror.ac.za/ [2] http://susepaste.org/93704356 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

2 years, 9 months

openSUSE-only security announcements

by Javier Llorente

Hello everyone! I don't know if it has been discussed before, but wouldn't it be good to have openSUSE-only security announcements at the opensuse-security mailing list? We could have one for openSUSE and another for SUSE, to stay focused. What do you think? Greetings! -- Javier Llorente

2 years, 9 months

Group photo on FOSDEM'18

by Alex Naumov

Hello everyone! What you, guys, think about makeing a group photo of openSUSE members on FOSDEM? Do you this idea? Make it make sense for people? :) I will say, we can meet all together near the openSUSE booth on Sunday at ca. 8:30 AM. Depend on weather and on number of participants we can make a photo outside the building of course. Most important here, as usual, get together and have a lot of fun ;-) Cheers, Alexander Naumov -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

2 years, 9 months

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openSUSE Project February 2018