Apologies for sending last email in HTML. I understand that it is *Strongly Discouraged*. On 16/04/2024 13:19, Richard Brown wrote:
Replying in Plain Text, as required by the Project's Rules:
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Mailing_lists_subscription#Can_I_send_attac...
Please can you start doing the same?
On 2024-04-16 12:04, Patrick Fitzgerald wrote:
Richard,
Instead of speculating, it would wise to attend the board meetings to take part in the debate, or at least listen to what is going on.
I strongly feel the Board have a responsibility to work for ALL the community, not just the exclusive community that attend Board Meetings.
If it is a policy of the openSUSE Board to treat issues raised in person with a higher priority or severity than other issues then please add that to the list of issues I feel the Board needs to address. What others do you have? Please share. Put it on the agenda!
I will _NOT_ be attending any Board Meetings while the Board effectively gives more weight to issues in those meetings to those across the Project
Calling 2 members of the board "empty chairs" is insulting and counter productive.
And yet both you and Doug were totally absent from the discussions till now. Discussions which your input could have been useful in. My views that you should be more directly engaged with the community are reinforced by how fast you and Doug have appeared to defend yourselves.
I would have preferred you defended the Board or the Community with this same passion. Well actually, as I think that this is a board matter, any further input from me would have been adding to noise.
If you _were_ to attend you would be party to the decisions and how they came to be made. Oh and the dissent as well.
If the only way of community has to understand the decisions of the Board is by attending a particular meeting at a particular time, then the Board is conducting itself in a way that inheriently disadvantages a wide number of members across the world. I do not agree with this practice. You are constructing a narrative that simply doesn't exist. I didn't suggest that at all. Was merely suggesting that you, and others, are free to attend the board meetings. We need more interest and involvement, not sniping.
Meetings have their place, but they have to be complimentary to a broader package of engagement with the community.
Else the Board is just going to have an echo-chamber of itself and a few who can afford to attend at the time that best suits the Board. Possibly a better use of your time would be to be more constructive is
That was not what I suggested. At all. these kind of matters.
I strongly believe that the Board should defend its decisions as a group.
Well I agree with that.
Once a decision is made, I feel the Board should all, collectively, own it and defend it.
Now I'm confused. So you want the whole board to come out, and individually defend the decisions made as a group? Or?
I think the best way forward is for the Board to collectively own it's decisions, even bad ones.
So, lets take the recent example.
The minutes made it clear, the Board decided to not act on the reports of the endless nonsense in IRC
The Board should have collectively owned that. All six of you.
I think that you'll find that we do take ownership, as a board, and it be discussed at the next meeting.
Gerald, Neal, Gertjan, should all have kept their individual mouths shut or fully backed the decision to not act. Or the Board should have made a different decision.
But as we see from the thread, what we got instead was an utterly confused mess, which I could even summarise for comedic effect
The minutes made it clear the Board decided to do nothing about IRC moderation. Shawn (Community Moderator) highlighted a project with that decision. Simon defended the Board decision, thread continued. Gerald, Gertjan, Neal, all undermined that Board decision by stating they supported the CoC, Moderation, etc.
As an observer to what happened in the "Board meeting minutes 2024-02-26" thread how can any reasnoble person come to any other conclusion than the Board is an absolute dysfunctional mess?
I don't want a dysfunctional Board. If you're going to make decisions (even bad ones, which leaving IRC as a mess would be), you all need to own them.
Or, if you'd prefer to continue in a mode similar to what we saw in this thread..where one thing was minuted just for 3 Board members to immediately say they wanted the opposite, then I think ALL Board members should be more active _WHERE THE COMMUNITY IS_..not in their ivory tower of meetings.
I won't bother quote-replying to the rest of your bullets or your other reply..best to keep the discussion focused on the big picture..I think that's something we all need to be better at.
Agreed re the big picture, and that we all need to be better at focusing on it. We are ALL (in other words, the entire community) trying our best with the time, information and abilities that we have to hand. The board needs more feedback, not less. /p