hi, i'm not an openSUSE member, but am a new user/community member. I'm using openSUSE for current projects, with plans for the future, so i care what happens and am a little concerned with all of this. I think most of the problems demonstrated by recent events, could be reduced by better adherence to the Guiding Principles. from the guiding principles:
... openness as in open collaboration, open communication, open development, open distribution, open source code, and open mind. and
... transparency of the decision making processes, transparency of communication and transparency of work and collaboration processes. That includes openly answering questions, providing all relevant information, and actively keeping all involved parties informed. We are convinced that a transparent culture whose inner workings can be understood by everybody provides the most efficient and rewarding environment to reach our goals.
Considering the above, I would think that all board meetings and other official business should have recorded video, audio or auto-generated transcripts (as tech allows and at the board's preference) made publicly available (or available to members behind login) on a consistent basis. I've seen other software projects do this, and it seems this would inspire confidence in the project, and promote participation, courtesy, professionalism, fairness and accountability. The current meeting summaries are a good start, but not enough, IMHO. Maybe good enough for the completely public (non-member) account of events, if the project chose to have two tiers. How are members supposed to be informed voters if they are not allowed to actually get to know the board members' past/current openSUSE legislative, executive, judicial, and behavioral/human interaction record (if you will)? Also, look at what has happened by trying to keep the recent events private. I doubt very seriously, that having the interactions public or member-accessible from the beginning, wouldn't have been better for the project. Just the fact that it would be public, might have changed how things manifested in the first place. Maybe not, idk what happened... (i don't think the fact that the discord channel could have been joined by anyone is relevant in this context. Participants likely felt it was somewhat private. I'm talking about the difference between how things are handled now, and publishing all official business in full, in a prominent place every time, so people can start consuming it at their leisure, and participants know this will happen, in advance.) I've never been on any board, so if there are people who think there are good reasons to not make official openSUSE business available to members (seemingly per the Guiding Principles), then an example scenario might be helpful. "Trust us, it's better this way" could be true, but doesn't alleviate concerns very well. All this being said, i'm not advocating that the current situation gets exacerbated with a No Confidence vote, or retroactively enforce more complete transparency. I'm just suggesting that things might could be clarified and improved going forward, so that this occurrence didn't happen in vain, and might can be avoided in the future. thanks ITwrx -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org