On Sun, 2 Sep 2018 at 19:49, Ana Martínez <anamma06@gmail.com> wrote:
- We don't manage to agree and need to vote to decide In this case I accept and respect the decision because it was democratically voted, but I do not agree on it. That means that if someone ask me, both privately and publicly, I will still defend my opinion. Richard says that decisions made collectively are defended collectively. I don't know if the board decided this in the past, in which case it should be documented somewhere and re-discuss when new members join. But I have never agreed that I should defend something I don't agree with.
When you joined the Board, you joined a decision making body that works as a Team. I expect any team member to support the decisions made of that team. Equally, I expect a well rounded team to also be supportive and open with dissent and complexity in their decision-making. I have no problem with the diversity of thought among the Board being public knowledge, but I do have a problem when that transitions from sharing the fact the board contains more than one opinion, to Board members publicly undermining the decision made by the collective whole group. This is one of the benefits that comes with the details of whom voted for what being private. As a Board we could share both the majority and minority views on any decisions. But as soon as names are attached the whole affair takes an air of a childish popularity contest, which detracts from the Boards ability to make decisions in awkward circumstances - which is the only kind of decisions the Board should be making. Therefore I continue to strongly disagree with many of your views here, and fear if they gained acceptance the Board's ability to function in the roles it exists for will be grossly undermined. We might get fuzzy feelings of self satisfaction by being more open and bragging about our individual decisions, but we risk turning the Board into a spectator sport or reality show drama, and not the only body the Project has to turn to in order make decisions when all other means fail it.
After that many answers in this email thread I think the board should discuss in the next meeting if we should make public who voted what (I'll ensure this happens).
I think it would be grossly inappropriate for the Board to discuss in private something we have collectively proven to be able to discuss in public. The fact that we're still having this conversation here means that any move to discuss this in the Board tonight would seem to be to be both hypocritical in the goal for more transparency, and the view that the Board meetings should be focused on topics which cannot be discussed openly. Therefore I will be objecting to any suggestion that we discuss this at tonight's meeting. We should keep talking about this here.
As others already gave their opinion, here is mine: When the board doesn't agree on something, but votes about it, who voted what should be public except if there is a good reason to not make it public (the reason should be included in the minutes). That includes for example, that we are resolving a conflict for which people wrote as expecting anonymity and that it is discussed in private.
I agree with your principle. My point is, the Board should only be deciding on topics where there is a good reason not to make it public.
openSUSE is not a company but a community (as Richard and Knurpht have pointed out). In a company it may happen that the company interests are not the same ones as the employees interests. But in the openSUSE board we are just trying to take the best decisions for the community which represent what the community wants. This in my opinion means that the decisions we make should be popular. Otherwise we are taking the wrong decisions.
Ana, our responsibility as a Board to make decisions in circumstances where a popular vote would be inappropriate. Taking decisions regarding conflicting members, rejecting/establishing relationships with other Projects and companies, and spending the money from our existing sponsors, always has the risk of being unpopular. We have the Board so the Project has people who can make unpopular, but trusted decisions. If the Board's function is only to make popular decisions, then we might as well not have a Board and put everything to a popular vote. And such an option is not viable in many of those cases. I'm happy to take from this lesson the collective decision that the Board will make less decisions and I will support any effort in the Board to push back from requests for it to make decisions and instead encourage more public debate and public decision making. But I outright reject your suggestion that the popularity of a decision should be a primary factor of the Boards decision making process. Such a suggestion would be particularly disruptive in our role as conflict resolvers - popular people can still be assholes, and the Board is who the Project needs to rely on to deal with such individuals. They shouldn't be shielded by their popularity. In the case of sponsorships, there is also the factor of who our sponsors are willing and enable to entrust with the decisions on how the Project spends their money. I can imagine many of our sponsors would be uncomfortable with the idea of their money being up for a public vote. Investigating the feasibility of such an idea might be a topic worthy of discussing in tonights meeting. Regards, Richard -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org