On Sun, Jul 14, 2024 at 2:44 AM Simon Lees <sflees@suse.de> wrote:
On 7/13/24 5:20 AM, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
Dear all,
Let me first define a couple of things that the community is being faced with:
- Our current governance is not working. With the things we're facing and the
current model / Board rules, there is no good way the Board could drive the
resulting changes coming up. Bi-weekly meetings will definitely not be enough. Furthermore, the Board has not shown any real proactive leadership in some situations where it should have. In the end, the reason I stepped down from it.
- Whether we like it or not, we have to rebrand the Project. We can start
working on it now and be proactive, or later be forced by f.e. some new owner
of SUSE ( mind, SUSE has expressed their concern about such a thing happening
and clearly stated that they do not want to get rid of the Project. ). To
drive this we need something else than the Board as it is now. But keeping
things as they are simply is an unrealistic option.
- We need more contributors. It is a simple fact that we have been losing those, So, we have to question ourselves not only on how we're getting more people in, but also on how we keep them in. From what I've seen too many of them start enthusiasticly and get burnt out because lack of onboarding / mentoring. That said, I've also seen exceptions to that.
What can we do?
Proposal is a project-team that drives the changes. That project-team should exist of users/contributors/members with ampel experience in the Project/Community, people who know how things currently work. Basically they would come up with a plan, evaluate that with Board and Community and when ready execute the plan. A thing that should be taken into consideration is how f.e. our governance should relate/communicate to/with the Foundation.
[Speaking as myself]
I agree that there is more work here that needs to be done then can just be done by the board in our general meetings, I also believe that there are people outside the board very willing to help drive this (I spoke to some at OSC), and that we as a board would be silly not to use them.
At the last meeting the discussion had only just started on the list so I and I believe others were willing to give it some time to run here. But next board meeting I was planning on proposing that we put together a working group including community members to help drive this forward. Especially if we want to look at new project structures the more people we have helping draft these the better they will be.
- The choice of a new name for the Project would best be a limited choice of ~3 names, that that team would have researched/checked, this to avoid having an endless list of non-workable options.
I'm less fussed about whether its 3 or 5 etc, but given trademarks are involved any proposed name will almost certainly need to be cleared by SUSE Legal prior to any form of vote on them.
Absolutely.
- The rebranding of the distros as f.e. "openSUSE Tumbleweed" to "Tumbleweed" is already an ongoing thing. I don't see any reason to have a discussion about that again.
This I am not personally convinced of, having had multiple discussions with people in the community there have certainly been more mixed feelings about this then anything else. There have also been genuine concerns around things like search engine results etc.
At the same time there are differing levels of this, Like if a wallpaper was to mention "Leap" or "Tumbleweed" it probably doesn't need to mention the project name, on the other hand /etc/os-release currently references openSUSE and having something continue in there would certainly be useful for me from a practical sense given there are many similarities between my Leap and Tumbleweed machines that are different on say a Debian or even Fedora machine.
Alongside that it probably also doesn't make sense to completely remove all references everywhere unless we have websites like leap.org or tumbleweed.org. There are also other things like currently we sponsor conferences as "openSUSE" and maybe have a booth where we talk about everything under our banner, (Often with a focus on Tumbleweed, Leap, MicroOS and Aeon) should we now sponsor conferences as Tumbleweed and Leap separately with separate booths?
In a very practical sense, these are all openSUSE Linux, just different variants or snapshots of it. I've personally felt for a long time that we've done ourselves a disservice by calling them "distributions" as if they're completely separate things. Sure, maybe openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap could be considered as such. But Krypton, MicroOS, Aeon, and Kalpa? They are all variants of openSUSE Tumbleweed, not wholly separate things in their own right. And Leap itself has Argon and Leap Micro as variants. Having an overarching banner that is clearly communicated in our deliverables and in our community benefits us when communicating and advocating.
- A vote on the Project logo has already been done, and was won by our LCP, no need to do that again. The people maintaining the distros have accepted LCP's logos as their distro logo, so using the same design for the Project makes sense since it gives a nice consistency.
This I also agree with, although it would be a good chance to ditch "Ugly Green" and re do our color branding guidelines with things like a Green that works better for Screen and print and then a Yellow for Leap that complements it but that is very much just my personal opinion as someone who's had to deal with it from the perspective of desktop theming etc.
It would definitely be nice to have a color palette that's more flexible and looks good on the screen and print. Right now, we don't really have that. :( -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!