Hi all, Le lundi 24 août 2020 à 15:54 +0930, Simon Lees a écrit :
Hi,
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One of the reasons for choosing a Stiftung over a E.V is that a Stiftung gives us a huge amount of flexibility in terms of governance models, some of the previous boards advice is that we should be able to take our existing "board election rules" and "membership rules" drop the fact that currently the chairman can veto board decisions and it should be possible to keep basically our current governance model. The previous boards proposals to both the community and SUSE were all around keeping the governance model around the same as what it currently is.
I have some more "minor" amendments i'll propose when I have some time with the idea to have them discussed etc so that the community can make an informed vote on adopting them or some variation of them during the board elections at the end of the year.
But if people in the community feel that we should look at significantly changing our governance structure by adding additional body's or changing the roles of the existing board then now is the right time for those discussions so that we can put it to the membership and SUSE at the same time.
Apart from specifying the future role of the current representative (will the future SUSE ambassador necessarily be the representative of the Foundation board?), I do not see any particular need to radically change the mode of governance. *To do* So I hereby invite everyone interested to chime in. Please get to know what's already been done on the first hand. And then give input, constructive criticism and ideas on both parts of the story - Foundation and Governance. It's a subject that interests me, I'm also currently working on the issue of governance at my work (in a cooperative society). The recent and unfortunate discussions have shown that this is an important subject which the community cannot ignore and which cannot simply rest on the shoulders of the Council. The content of the wiki [3] is a good starting point which I think needs to be refined. I started an Etherpad [6] by rereading the original topic [7] (over a year ago already!) and noting some points in order to summarize past discussions. I also tried to look for resources (in English) on the subject (German Stiftung) in order to see more clearly concerning the legal aspects. [8] [9].
I have also struggled with this part and have mostly relied on German speaking board members and somewhat people from other foundations. Here is a basic summary of the key points as I remember them, I guess it should also go into the wiki somewhere.
I have created a "glossary" page [0] to gather and explain the Foundation terminology. **The Charter** - This is a statement on the aims goals and mission of the foundation, once the foundation is incorporated this statement can't be changed, A well written charter will give the community and SUSE comfort that the board of the foundation can't go off and start doing something radically different. For example it could state that the foundation supports free and open software / (hardware?) projects and that all the code / designs must be publicly accessible. At the same time we need to be careful not to limit ourselves to certain technologies etc, because who knows if Linux for example will be the best kernel in 50 years. **50k Seed** - Unlike many other forms of foundation setting up a Stiftung requires 50k as a seed fund. This is something previous boards have also discussed with SUSE. **No predefined legal structure.** - Stiftung's don't have a predefined governance structure in terms of the board makeup and how they are appointed which gives us significant freedom in this area. However there are quite strict rules around keeping financial accounts and yearly reporting to the point where it is unreasonable to be able to expect volunteers to do this work. For reference a Stiftung is the same legal structure Libre Office uses so we can use them as legal precedence and gain alot of ideas from what they did.
If you're still working on this topic, how does the group of community members Vinz wants to bring together can help in this task? [0] https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Foundation_glossary -- Sébastien Poher