Hello, Am Montag, 18. Mai 2020, 14:34:55 CEST schrieb Simon Lees:
On 5/18/20 8:37 PM, Richard Brown wrote:
On Sat, 2020-05-16 at 14:34 -0700, Fraser_Bell wrote:
Although, I must say, the thought that a minority can cause a full re-election of the elected Board Officials deeply distresses me.
In that case, if that happens, I personally will be considering giving up my openSUSE Membership and leaving openSUSE.
Gerry, I have to admit that I disagree with your opinion about the 20% rule - but nevertheless, I'd be be sad to see you leaving. Even if, and especially because ... [...]
so this is a matter of Principle with me.
... I really like people who stand for their principles. We need more of them, not less ;-) (Besides that, I like your music ;-)
I think the point you are neglecting to consider is that the 20% rule is not "The membership should be proactively asked to see whether 20% of them disagree with the democractically elected Board and to trigger a reelection"
But the 20% rule is more "if 20% of the membership is driven enough to, themselves, proactively push for re-electing the whole Board, then that re-election is triggered"
That's something that is not defined in the rule. Of course we can speculate in both directions how it was meant ;-) I know from some associations in germany that their rules state that members have a right to get the list of members if they want to start a non-confidence vote so that they can contact all members. (Without this rule, the board could keep the membership list secret and easily prevent the non-confidence vote to succeed.) That rule is even more extreme than "the membership gets asked" - and still, I haven't seen a non-confidence vote in the associations I know in all the years I remember.
Given we're a project where 1 person can contribute and change a lot technically, if the Board is ruling in a way to, speaking frankly, piss off 20% of the membership enough to drive them to campaign against the Board, then maybe re-electing the Board is the best option for community harmony.
Given some of your mails in the last months, I'm surprised to say: I couldn't agree more (well, except s/maybe// ;-)
That said, I think the rule was never written with the idea of the election committee getting involved.
I'm not sure if the people who wrote this rule thought about how it would work in practise. I'd guess that they hoped there would never be a need for this rule to be used - and IMHO that's the most likely explanation why the 20% rule doesn't go into all details.
I certainly always envisioned that such cases requiring far more proactive engagement from the disgruntled 20% than just 1 person calling for a vote of no confidence..a call that wasn't even seconded on the mailinglist..
I'm not going to re-read the full discussion, but I remember some mails that were quite close to seconding that call. And, see below, stating that in public clearly isn't easy.
When looking at this the problem we have is with things like mail spoofing etc The only way we can actually be sure that the opinion's we are getting are actually from members is with Helios and its then obvious that its best that the board isn't handling that process.
There's another thing I'd even consider more important than the technical difficulties of requiring people to send mails: the chilling effect. I can imagine that a requirement to send a mail to a public mailinglist (including public archives) would stop several people from signing the non-confidence vote/petition. Not because they aren't pissed off enough, but because they are afraid of getting punished (in whatever way) for stating their opinion. Just as a hypothetical example: let's say Richard would send a public statement that the board pissed him off and should resign. Some board members are his colleagues, and I'm somewhat sure that they would (diplomatically spoken) like him less after reading such a statement. As a result, working together for sure won't be easier afterwards - even if it's completely unrelated to what the board did. Of course this isn't limited to colleagues working in the same company. It also applies to community members, and I'd hate to see friendships breaking because of "what? you voted against the board?!" IMHO _that_ is the most important reason why using Helios makes sense - it limits the amount of people who can see who voted against the board to the election commitee (I hope using voter aliases gets enabled to ensure this!) and limits the chilling effect. Actually I'd even love to see a second option to choose, maybe "ignore me". It wouldn't have an impact on the end result (we'd still need 20% of the members asking for a re-election), but if only a few people choose it, it would make it impossible even for the election commitee to know who voted against the board because "$person voted" would no longer be equal to "$person voted against the board". Don't get me wrong: I trust the election commitee. Nevertheless, I'd still prefer a solution that doesn't even need any trust when it comes to such sensitive data - data that is probably more sensitive than which candidates you vote for in a board election. But maybe I'm just too paranoid from years of AppArmor development and several so-called "AppArmor WTF moments"[1] ;-) TL;DR: There are good reasons why elections have secret ballots. A non-confidence vote is more sensitive, therefore it also has to have secret ballots (with the obvious exception that a brave person needs to publicly start it).
However, I think the election committees compromise of a petition does a good job of keeping with the spirit of the rule and requiring people to step up if they are unhappy even if it undoubtly does lower the bar for a re-election
Yeah with the perspective of an upcoming foundation I think whatever we come up with needs to have only one clear interpretation
Agreed, and ideally it should also include a timeline - two months are clearly too long. (Not meant as critism of the election commitee - I can imagine that it wasn't easy to come up with a good way to handle this without having any guidelines in our election rules.)
Even with issues around email addresses etc I think documenting that 20% of membership must +1 an email to openSUSE project would probably be workable.
I completely disagree with requiring +1 mails to opensuse-project (unless you want to make the board really untouchable by abusing the chilling effect - but then, it's easier to simply drop the 20% rule ;-) Using a petition with non-public list of signers is the only sane way how the 20% rule can work in the way it's intended, because being afraid of getting punished (in whatever way) for signing the non-confidence vote should never ever be a reason not to sign. Regards, Christian Boltz [1] AppArmor WTF moments are the moments when you check your audit.log or use aa-logprof to update your AppArmor profiles, and see that a program wants permissions you'd never expect it needs. As an extreme (and luckily made up) example: if ping would require read access to your home directory, that would qualify ;-) -- // If non-crazy input manages to reach this code path, // we should consider it a bug. [from MediaWiki 1.27.4 languages/LanguageConverter.php] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org