Hi, I'm asking Neal the following questions because they flow well from what he has already written, however i'd be keen to hear all candidates answers. As some background i've spent much of the last 3 years looking into the question of an "openSUSE Foundation", Our initial conclusion was it was too risky, but then we had some indication SUSE maybe willing to help us make it work so we put together the proposal That was presented to the community on this list and at the openSUSE Conference in 2019. That experience has lead to me having the following questions. On 12/6/20 1:22 AM, Neal Gompa wrote:
On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 10:39 AM Vojtěch Zeisek <vojtech.zeisek@opensuse.org> wrote:
Hello, dear candidates, I'd have few questions. :-) First of all, it's pleasure to see platforms of such a good candidates. Regardless results, I'm sure the updated Board will be excellent.
Of that, I'm definitely sure. Everyone who has stepped up has excellent platforms.
I'd like to ask all of You (platforms [1-6]) for which of Your activities (read ways You help to improve the Project) do You need (or is highly helpful) to be Board member? I mean for which of Your targets, aims, goals, thoughts, agendas or objectives You need to be in Board, why is it necessary or helpful? Or asking from the opposite side, what of Your aims You can't do as any other community member?
In my platform, I tried to make it clear that most of what I do in openSUSE today does *not* require me to be a member of the Board. In fact, I have been tremendously successful doing technical and non-technical work as a regular community member. In this regard, I consider becoming a member of the Board another avenue in which I can help drive a different (somewhat underappreciated) aspect of the Project to be better.
Second, how do You understand the sentence "The purpose of the openSUSE Board is to lead the overall project." ([7], bit longer version at [8]) regarding the "main tasks" listed there and lack of any sort of executive power? Which kind of leadership (or governance), if any, do You have in mind in association with our Board?
I've worked in projects where the governance model has hard powers (explicit ability to direct) and soft powers (only ability to persuade). The openSUSE Board is pretty much in the latter camp. So from this angle, being a member of the Board is about leveraging "soft power" leadership: being a model contributor, working with others to support the community, and setting the tone for the community.
Additionally, as we transition to independent ownership, we are going to have to restructure the governance so that the Board has additional explicit powers to manage the Foundation and support the Project in that capacity. What that looks like is unknown right now, but I feel that my perspective can help us figure that out.
Currently the proposals for an "openSUSE Foundation" have not had a goal of Independence from SUSE, rather as a entity that sits somewhat alongside our existing partnership with SUSE that would allow us to do more things. Do you believe that a foundation needs to result in complete independence of SUSE, or is there some middle ground? I guess as an extreme example to gain a better understanding do you believe an independent openSUSE should end up maintaining and running assets such as openSUSE's build service? Or do you believe that an arrangement where an openSUSE Foundation exists, but SUSE continues to own and maintain openSUSE assets such as the build service should exist?
DocB, Mark, simotek and Neal, do You have any particular idea how that foundation should look like? What are main advantages and risks of this transition?
Organizationally, the Foundation is going to need more explicit governance of the Project than what the Board does today, because the Foundation will be responsible for everything produced by the Project. We're going to need to grow organs that can market the Foundation and the Project to drive regular donations to support the community and the development of everything under the Foundation's aegis. We'll need to manage a real budget, too. These are things we do not have to do because we do not exist as a free-standing entity. Once we are, we need to be set up for success so that we don't collapse within a year or two.
And that underlies the very real risk around this effort: there may simply not be enough continual community support to *keep* the Foundation alive. Depending on the rules that we elect to impose on ourselves by where and how we incorporate the legal entity, we could be involuntarily dissolved due to lack of solvency.
Previous boards who drafted the last foundation proposal shared this concern, the proposal we came to the community with involved asking SUSE to provide a part time staff member to look after the foundations books and reporting obligations as this role would be an essential part of the project and SUSE has committed to providing all the essential things openSUSE requires. We believed that this would be reasonable as there is a number of ways that SUSE could use a foundation to save some money, for example a foundation would allow us to have proper sponsorships for the openSUSE Conference so SUSE wouldn't have to pay as much. It should also be noted that SUSE has employed staff to help manage the 2 main parts of openSUSE's budget in the past, Namely conference sponsorships and the travel support program, we envisioned this as being a similar arrangement although the person in this case would report more directly to the foundation board. We saw this as the one major recurring cost that the foundation would have to have and agreed as a board at the time that we couldn't recommend a foundation to the community without such sponsorship (At the time SUSE saw this as possible enough that we continued discussions around a foundation, however since then SUSE's leadership has changed significantly). How do you and the other candidates think about this? Do you believe it would be too much of a risk to the community to create a foundation without such ongoing sponsorship either from SUSE or a different party? If you don't believe it would be too great a risk how do you think we can best manage the risk? And as an aside do you believe there will be any other ongoing costs that a foundation will need to cover? A final question to all candidates, In our last foundation proposal [1] we proposed continuing to allow SUSE to appoint someone to the board in some form (We didn't propose concrete details). We believed that this would continue to be important as SUSE would continue to provide openSUSE with a significant number of things, atleast until the point where by far the most significant sponsor of openSUSE if that ever happened. What is everyone's opinion on that idea? Thank you all for your time. 1. https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2019-06/msg00233.html -- 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