Op donderdag 6 september 2018 01:00:37 CEST schreef Jim Henderson:
On Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:43:31 +0200, Christian Boltz wrote:
Hello,
Am Mittwoch, 5. September 2018, 00:21:34 CEST schrieb Jim Henderson:
On Tue, 04 Sep 2018 15:40:29 +0200, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
Another thing that comes to mind when voting is public, is that ( also from experience ) there's a fair chance that the community will not discuss board decicions, but the voting behaviour of it's individual members.
Which is fine. If the community doesn't feel like a member of the board is properly representing their interests or delivering on their campaign promises or stated goals for running for the board, that would seem to be a fair discussion for the community to have, no?
That's a tricky question - whatever I answer will paint me into a corner ;-) : :) : You _and_ Gertjan have good arguments, but sadly we can't have both ways at the same time. Maybe my answer below will at least ensure that I paint myself into the green corner ;-)
Well, it seems to me that the board is asking the community to trust it - but I think trust needs to be a two-way street, and the board needs to trust the community as well.
There's a "little" difference between keeping technical issues private vs. keeping board topics/discussions which often involve humans private. (Hint: The reason for keeping the Spectre exploits/patches private is _not_ to protect the humans who designed the "broken" CPU.)
True, but my point remains - there was a good reason to keep those exploits secret while the updates were being worked on. Similarly, there are instances where it makes sense to keep a board vote private. But in both instances, defaulting to "open" is, in my mind, a totally valid reason.
But the policy doesn't prohibit Linus calling another developer a moron for doing something that he (Linus) feels was a stupid thing to do and calling attention to bad decisions made by developers on the team.
I've only read a few of Linus' rants, but most of those I've read were beyond our guiding principles, so Linus might be at risk of receiving a formal warning if he ever posts such a rant on an openSUSE mailinglist ;-) Yes, I can imagine that lots of people, including the press, might have lots of fun reading such a warning, and the one sending it will probably end up in a funny[tm] shitstorm ;-)
With all due respect to Gertjan (who is a fellow forums admin), his responses to Brian were in a similar vein to some of Linus' rants at other developers (perhaps a bit tamer), yet he doesn't seem to have been given any sort of formal warning here.
I've already apologized for language used, and for an emotional reaction. I still regret having been harsh. Given that, I don't think Bryan would have like his actions made public, and yes, I did bring that up, in private as well as in the board. Where Bryan never brought up these things until his term was done, and that hurt.
Back to the topic: Complaining about bad code is of course [more than] ok, but it should be done without personal attacks ("this code is bad" vs. "you are an idiot")
I don't fundamentally disagree with that assessment, but this is going down a rabbit hole that is steering away from the actual topic. I was providing that as an example of how to do "open with some limitations" properly - the specific details of how it's handled on LKML vis-a-vis Linus yelling at developers for doing "stupid" things is really beside the point.
I would argue that the same thing is true here - having the board be open about the things that they vote on makes the board stronger, not weaker.
I'll give you two answers on this ;-)
1) Personally, I don't have a problem with making my votes public, even if a specific vote might be unpopular or in hindsight turn out to be wrong.
Good. :) We're all human, and nobody should ever be afraid to be wrong. We all make mistakes, and we all screw up. If we don't, we're not taking risks and not having experiences that we can grow from.
2) The problem is that making my votes public also means you can guess (or even know, if I'm the "1" in a "5:1" vote) how the other board members voted. I understand the arguments of those board members who think that having the votes public would come with side effects (like voting for what people will like instead of what makes sense, or discussions about the voting behaviour while "ignoring" the board decision).
Which is why the board should be entirely on-board with being open when there's not a third-party privacy issue involved (the other point of the Spectre/Meltdown example - there was a third-party privacy issue involved - Intel's - and a responsible disclosure issue as well).
Making my own votes public would basically mean to make the votes of the other board members public, and I won't do that to the other board members unless they agree with making it public, or I think the other's votes were completely stupid ;-) (which, BTW, never happened yet)
That's fair. I would encourage you, as a member of the board, to promote this idea inside the board further.
For now, I'll do a similar offer as Simon already did - if you want to know how I voted on something, ask me in a private mail, and I'll probably answer ;-)
That's fair. :)
But what I'm hearing (no disrespect to any of the board here) is that the board doesn't think the membership can "handle the truth".
I think we are more than capable of handling that information.
Agreed on that, but IMHO you are looking at the wrong problem ;-)
The (IMHO) real problem is that you'll often only know "half of the truth" because we have to keep some aspects private, or simply because the summary in the meeting minutes doesn't include every little detail. (A board meeting usually takes an hour, which is much longer than the minutes which you can read in 3, well, minutes.)
A summary, by definition, isn't a full record of what transpired - so yeah, we understand that. But in cases like this (and I'm thinking of US courts where there's a panel of judges as an example), a "majority opinion" and a "dissenting opinion" are published together. Maybe for issues where it's appropriate, the board could do something like this when there isn't consensus.
Of course you can always ask for more details to get a fuller picture [1], and we'll provide these details whenever possible - which also means that sometimes that won't be possible.
Naturally. Depends on the topic, and I think most of us in the community understand that.
Damn, did I painted myself into the middle of the room now while carefully avoiding all corners? ;-) Since the topic is not clearly black or white, I'm not even surprised... : :D
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I've found this much more constructive than some of the other sub-discussions here.
Jim
I'd like to mention some things here, from the thread: - The board has never been more transparent ( Vincent/Wafaa ) than currently. - One of the ongoing items in the board meetings ( with publishing regular minutes on the project ML ) actually is transparency. Do not expect us to be perfect in this matter. FWIW we decided NOT to discuss this ( thread ) in our yesterday BM, instead to keep it here, with us as individuals taking part. - What does sadden me: I've always felt that after standing up for board ( not my personal plan, but on community request ) I could count votes as a statement of trust in that I would work as a board member in the interest of the community. From this thread I get that doesn't fit. If I would have known I'd be out in the open "stark naked", I doubt I would have stepped up. Has it ever occurred to someone that as a board member my first priority is the community, not by personal desires / opinions? That this ( it hasn't, but still ) might influence my vote, having the knowledge as a board member now, but not before being elected? - Are we going to deal with all the other teams like this as well? I.e. Are the forums team going 100% transparent? Can all the mod area discussions be anonimized and publised? Same for the other teams? - FWIW: I'm all for transparency, but not just like that. The process the board has already started has to be dealt with very carefully, to make sure no one and nothing gets damaged. Like said before: seen too many occasions where this went wrong at the cost of people's reputations, personal life. -- Gertjan Lettink a.k.a. Knurpht openSUSE Board Member openSUSE Forums Team -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org