Hi On 3/1/20 5:33 AM, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Sat, 29 Feb 2020 19:17:55 +0100, Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:
how to manage the project? Any better formalisable idea than what we already have? "Political culture" is hard to formalize (and enforce), but can we improve our own rules to as much as possible avoid any future (such) issues?
I think the implementation of some bylaws (which we seem to be missing) would be a step in the right direction.
Right now our governance model includes a board and an appointed treasurer. We're supposed to have bylaws, but I have not been able to find them documented anywhere.
As I understand it (and I'm no expert on how non-profits are run), it's standard practice to have a published budget and a set of bylaws that outline the various roles, responsibilities, and processes used in governance.
I think that's the root of the problem here; we apparently don't have any bylaws, and the board operates under the principles of "just trust that we're doing the right thing" - which makes it impossible for there to be any accountability, and results in requests for accountability and transparency being taken as personal attacks - in the line of "why don't you trust us?"
Firstly as a simple one we don't publish any form of budget, openSUSE has no legal entity therefore we can't have any assets or money so it makes no sense to publish any form of budget currently. openSUSE has no money, currently it just has an agreement that SUSE will provide all the core things it needs. But this is something we'd like to change with a foundation. openSUSE does have a bunch of rules that you could consider bylaws that we follow. All the ones we follow related to the board including elections, removals the community replacing the board etc can be found at [1]. Rules around membership and the membership officials can be found at [2]. If you have feedback on how you think these could be improved that would be much appreciated as these combined with any items we need to add to comply with legal requirements will likely form the basis of the openSUSE Foundations constitution. 1. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_rules 2. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Members -- 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