On 7/17/24 9:33 PM, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
Hey,
On 15.07.24 04:41, Tony Walker wrote:
On 7/10/24 13:15, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
On 10.07.24 18:45, Tony Walker wrote:
On 7/10/24 09:19, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
Don't get me wrong, those are things that may need to happen in one form or another. Power also will have to be exercised in one form or another in bad situations. But those activities have next to *no* effect on the sustainability of this community.
While I don't agree entirely here (described in a different email), structure (or formalization) and building power are not necessarily connected. Formalization can also protect open and democratic processes from abuse.
Having more formalized "governance" to protect our democratic processes from abuse would be a nice solution *if* we would have this problem. But we don't.
Yes, that is exactly why I used that phrase. I hoped that an elder of the project who might see this as a recruiting problem might take the opportunity the new person (me) provided.
While each of us may use a different word or phrase, this is recurring problem on the various email lists. I see it when people point to a lack of transparency or inclusion, for example. The discussion I have seen over the last few months told me that the governance model is broken. Whether temporary or inherent, it hurts recruiting.
The formal "governance" we have is no governance :-) People, and it seems to me you do too, seem to largely misunderstand the role of the openSUSE Board as an legislative entity that makes up the rules, hands out responsibility and exerts oversight over the project. While our guiding principles clearly state that the openSUSE Board is the (glorified) group of people that broker conflict resolution and communication.
We don't have anyone that could "delegate some responsibility solely to some team", we have people that form some team and *take* responsibility over some topic.
We as a community need to figure out *functioning* teams of maintainers for the topics we need. We need to figure out what we need to change to keep the teams we *have* working and what is needed to grow those teams and what we need to provide so it's easier to build teams maintainers in openSUSE.
What we don't need, in my opinion, is building "governance" structure for people to tell others what to do OR a new brand.
I think we can work towards a new governance system without having rolls that tell people what to do. We are a community of volunteers who will volunteer there time where they see fit (Including looking at better governance). Under our current system people can't tell anyone what to do, in certain cases they can tell people they can't do something, such as you can't submit that update as it doesn't meet our current packaging standards or as part of a conflict resolution process the board may tell someone they can't do something, personally I don't want to see that aspect of our governance changing. At the same time we could do a better job of guiding people who want to be guided into the most useful places. Which is something the current board struggles to have time for in its current format. The role of the current board is below Act as a central point of contact Help resolve conflicts Communicate community interests to SUSE Facilitate communication with all areas of the community Facilitate decision making processes where needed. Initiate discussions about new project wide initiatives Added to that we used to appoint a Treasurer to help with TSP and other sponsorships and SUSE allows us to administer trademarks for them. With the creation of a foundation this role will grow so while the solution with the least change would be to say that we keep everything as is and the Board appoints the people overseeing the foundation maybe those people should be directly accountable to the community via elections similar to the board. Maybe the board should also take this on? Which would be an increase on the current workload. On any given day anything that comes to the board, be it any of its above roles Is one of Technical, Community / People, or Financial / Legal. In a community our size there are very few people who are really good at all these things. So we could move to a model where the "Foundation Board" is responsible solely for Financial and Legal issues. While a "Technical Board" is then responsible for. Act as a central point of contact Help resolve conflicts Communicate community interests to SUSE Facilitate communication with all areas of the community Facilitate decision making processes where needed. Initiate discussions about new project wide initiatives When it relates to Technical based issues. A "Community Council" who is responsible for. Act as a central point of contact Help resolve conflicts Communicate community interests to SUSE Facilitate communication with all areas of the community Facilitate decision making processes where needed. Initiate discussions about new project wide initiatives When it comes to issues related to the community or anything else that's not Technical, Legal and or Financial. The issue that then needs to be dealt with is how the groups communicate between each other if there are conflicts between them. I guess one model could be if the Community Council and Technical Board each appointed two members (Or people on there behalf) to the foundation board. But there are many other models, that's just one I thought of now. But this starts to do a better job at getting the right people into the right roles. -- 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