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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

Hoping this finds you well,

Best regards,

--

Gertjan Lettink a.k.a. Knurpht

openSUSE Forums Team

openSUSE Mods Team