On 11/9/19 3:50 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:
Nobody really believes that a handful of only 491 "members" using openSUSE/Tumbleweed represents "the community", do they?
To a large extent I do at least to a "reasonable extent", one of the roles of a package maintainer is to represent the views / wishes of the users of said package within the distro, they are in essence the connecting bridge between users and the distro. Similarly forum moderators at least from my experience generally represent the views of those on the forums they moderate (or atleast consider them anyway) and you could take that analogy forward to many of the other people who are members. In recent years membership has been opened up to practically anyone who is contributing to the project in some way, personally I think this is quite a reasonable place to draw the line, the people eligible for membership have all invested some time in the project as some would say they all have some form of "Skin in the Game" Opening a vote up to anyone is unlikely to be any fairer, they often open themselves up to social media campaigns and people getting friends of friends to vote. We also can't really guarantee to reach every user. Similarly it would be nearly impossible to create a system that verifies that people who claim to be users are actually users and not just someones friend etc. On the other hand under the current system if a long term user is passionate about having a say, its likely not hard for them to start contributing in some minor way from support to documentation which would make them eligible for membership and therefore to vote. So while our current system may not be a 100% exact representation of the community, its likely the most accurate we can come up with. Along with the fact that while there was enough support for change that this process was worth while the result was really quite clear and the actual exact values don't matter that much in our decision making beyond the "clearly the community that voted wants to keep the existing name" -- 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