On Sunday 04 October 2015 11:50:51 Richard Brown wrote:
KDE e.V and the GNOME Foundation for example have Boards. These boards are elected by a subset of their wider community, which in both cases call themselves 'Members'.
The comparison with KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation is misleading. The
organizations and the governance are very different from what we have in
openSUSE.
For both KDE and GNOME, the non-profit organizations are the legal
representative of the community. The organizations own the assets of the
community and they are the only formal body providing governance. They have
formal power and responsibility. That's why they have a formal structure with
all the required rules and legal consequences.
openSUSE is a single-vendor community. Its assets are owned by SUSE. From a
purely legal point of view the governance is very simple: SUSE controls what
is happening under the openSUSE name. The company has all the formal power,
such as owning the trademarks, the domains, the servers, financing events,
employing core contributors, etc.
Now SUSE has made a strong commitment to running openSUSE as open project and
letting the community take control about a lot of what is happening following
the principles of open source. This takes building conventions, procedures,
and communication structures to enable the community to work effectively in an
open way.
When we wrote the guiding principles our goal was to express this, to capture
the values and the desired culture of the community as well as the commitment
of SUSE. This is the base for the collaboration in the community. Later some
more concrete procedures were added to define how the board elections are
handled in detail, that's where the membership was introduced.
But the nature of the procedures we have is very different from those of a
formal organizations which has legal rights and responsibilities. In openSUSE
it's about communication, about social contracts, about culture, and
conventions how to organize work. The role of the board is not about executing
the necessary work to run a formal organization but about communication,
especially with SUSE as the company standing behind the community.
I think this is the core of the discussion we are having here and had at other
places before. We need to develop clarity about the kind of community we have,
and not pretend we are something different.
We have a huge asset with SUSE being behind openSUSE. There is alignment
between SUSE's business interests and the interests of the community, so it
helps SUSE to have this community and it helps the community to have SUSE.
This provides a lot of momentum. It is a powerful setup. We should embrace it
and focus on where we can make a tangible difference through openSUSE.
P.S.: Thanks for the good discussion. Debate can help to create insight, and I
think this is happening here.
--
Cornelius Schumacher