On Sun, Jul 14, 2024 at 10:41 PM Tony Walker <tony.walker.iu@gmail.com> wrote:
On 7/10/24 13:15, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
Hey,
On 10.07.24 18:45, Tony Walker wrote:
On 7/10/24 09:19, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
Don't get me wrong, those are things that may need to happen in one form or another. Power also will have to be exercised in one form or another in bad situations. But those activities have next to *no* effect on the sustainability of this community.
While I don't agree entirely here (described in a different email), structure (or formalization) and building power are not necessarily connected. Formalization can also protect open and democratic processes from abuse.
Having more formalized "governance" to protect our democratic processes from abuse would be a nice solution *if* we would have this problem. But we don't.
Yes, that is exactly why I used that phrase. I hoped that an elder of the project who might see this as a recruiting problem might take the opportunity the new person (me) provided.
While each of us may use a different word or phrase, this is recurring problem on the various email lists. I see it when people point to a lack of transparency or inclusion, for example. The discussion I have seen over the last few months told me that the governance model is broken. Whether temporary or inherent, it hurts recruiting.
It may not be obvious, but I have been vetting OpenSUSE to see if this is a place I want to join.
We have another problem: not enough contributors to sustain this community in the long run. If we don't fix that it doesn't matter if we protect our democratic processes better in case of abuse. No people, no democratic processes, no abuse.
Yes. Something has to give. Good code or awesome installers are only part of the project. People like me are looking at the team, etc. If OpenSUSE doesn't fix the governance and communication problems, and solve the problems that frankly are solved elsewhere, no one will join.
But there are also meaningful ways to grow our community:
I agree, but I contend that formalization of communication and open democratic processes will help here. I am not necessarily advocating the Debian model, but it worth considering part of it.
That would also be a nice experiment if we could transfer from one state (our current form) to another other state (influenced by Debian's form) while causing *no* friction and additional work while doing this transition.
I mention Debian only as an example. OpenSUSE isn't Debian, Fedora, or another other distribution. It is good to steal good ideas from them though. Also, any transition to some future-state would and should be step-wise and well-planned. For example, the board could delegate some responsibility solely to some team (what doesn't matter), the team is elected and serves some term (1 year, 3 years, whatever).This team could be marketing, packaging, moderating, etc. It doesn't matter. What matters is that the team is composed largely of members working in that area. As more teams are added, it might be good to add one member from each team.
This is just an example. Feel free to contribute your own ideas. Progress will bring excitement and new members.
But we can't. We have the people we have. We have the resources we have. We are in the state we are in. Our communities efforts are like a coin. We can spend them any way we wish, but we can only spend it once.
Despair won't bring new members. Something has to give.
It's not just 'bringing new members'. It's keeping them that's the problem. Lots of folks, myself included, have 'joined' openSUSE to some degree over the last several years. And then left, because it simply wasn't worth it to keep trying to contribute, while dealing with a severely broken governance structure. Or, perhaps more aptly, the lack thereof. Despair isn't the problem. It's the structure of the project, and the lack of continuity. The lack of anyone seeming to care what goes on in most of it - as long as people are 'doing', no one else seems to care about whether or not they are actually being beneficial to the project at large, or actively driving away contributors - both new, and old. Yes, you can 'spend' the coin of the community you have. But, that's the problem. All anyone has been doing for years is 'spending' that coin. And not bothering to even think about using it to grow, and thereby have more in the future. Just spending. As a result, the project is reaching a point, where there *is* no more to spend. And then what? That's where we are now.
Henne
-- Tony Walker <tony.walker.iu@gmail.com> PGP Key @ https://tonywalker1.github.io/pgp 9F46 D66D FF6C 182D A5AC 11E1 8559 98D1 7543 319C
-- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe