On 8/3/20 7:43 PM, Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:
Dne pondělí 3. srpna 2020 11:48:03 CEST, Simon Lees napsal(a):
On 8/3/20 7:03 PM, Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:
Dne pondělí 3. srpna 2020 11:00:17 CEST, Richard Brown napsal(a):
On Mon, 2020-08-03 at 10:42 +0200, Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:
I fully understand Your point, but still I think jdd's proposal has good base. I think we do need some "conciliation" board or so made from old and honorable community members, ehm. :-) Not necessarily from past Board members, IMHO separate voting would be better, so that there is no link with the Board (and no possible conflict of (emotional, ...) interests or so). I suppose there should be not much work for such group (ehm...), so there could be just ~3 people voted for longer time.
Putting my own objections aside which are primarily based on my experience and exhaustion at the nonsense you need to deal with in such a position and trying to look at this rationally. It seems to me you are suggesting an elected body to act as a conflict resolution body for our elected Board which acts as a conflict resolution body?
Every body supposed to solve conflicts must be independent on all possible sides (well, as much as possible...). This is why every modern constitution has judiciary as independent unit.
In the time when I have been on the board, other then this case any conflict has generally been between 2 of the 6 members, in these cases the remaining members of the board have been able to deal with the issue, likewise if the issue involves a member of the board and others not on the board generally that member will step aside as the issue is handled. So it only really needs to be for a very small number of cases. Certainly yes larger organizations and government agencies etc have an independent body but who appoints those people? Could it maybe make sense for the board to appoint people at the start of each new term to handle any issues that arise presuming there are no ongoing conflicts? That should be independent enough and saves a vote for a committee that likely will not do anything. If you can find some examples of projects our size that have such provisions in there constitutions I would certainly be interested in learning from them.
And how big is openSUSE? :-) I really don't know. We have some 500+ members, right? What about number of contributors? Is it +/- same number, or do these two groups significantly differ?
It really depends on how you count a contributor, I would count it as 500 contributors who have strong interest in how the project is run, beyond that we have many many more contributors who contribute on a much smaller scale, maybe pushing an occasional package or change, occasionally helping with a support question etc. On the other end of the scale we have some significant contributors who are less interested in project governance or that have always been happy enough that they haven't taken the step to become members (Although the name vote did get some of them to join). There are also some SUSE employee's who just contribute to openSUSE because its a part of there job and they need to to get there stuff in the next SUSE release (Although the vast majority of SUSE people contributing to openSUSE are very passionate about openSUSE).
Might be bit outlying, but our https://www.skaut.cz/english/ (over 12 000 volunteers) has conciliation board with 5 members, it is voted by plenary assembly, otherwise completely separated from any other governance bodies, and it has defined remits. Probably too detailed for openSUSE, but it works well, it's respected last instance. I wonder if/how such things are solved in another major distros, or in projects like LibreOffice, Mozilla, KDE, ...?
One of the board's primary roles infact possibly its largest roll is to be openSUSE's "conciliation board" so really the issue we are addressing here is how does a project handle a conflict within a "conciliation board" that involves a significant enough proportion of that board that any remaining members don't feel they can resolve the conflict. If the project has other appointed boards and structures this can be slightly easier because you could just nominate one of them. In the openSUSE case the board isn't responsible for creating technical policy etc, however if two parties wish to create conflicting technical policies then it becomes the openSUSE Boards role to help mediate and resolve such a conflict. So if there was to be a second group responsible for conflict resolutions i'm not quite sure where you'd draw the line, the existing board could also then end up with 80% less work. -- 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