Thank You for Your answers and time. Dne sobota 5. prosince 2020 15:52:59 CET, Neal Gompa napsal(a):
On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 10:39 AM Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:
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.
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. However, that risk can also be a potential advantage: with an independent legal entity able to accept donations and sponsorships, we can more actively pursue activities to get more resources to support activities in the project, such as getting POWER and RISC-V hardware to contributors with proven track records to help support the community port if they can't afford it themselves. The goal here is to supercharge the Project, and so everything we're doing here should be taken under that lens to determine how we structure this to best support that.
Here are very interesting and important points which will have to be opened one day. If we create some sort of Foundation, would we need some changes of role of the Board and/or governance model? -- Vojtěch Zeisek https://trapa.cz/ Komunita openSUSE GNU/Linuxu Community of the openSUSE GNU/Linux https://www.opensuse.org/