On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 16:22, Per Jessen <per@computer.org> wrote:
- 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?
If those teams are elected or appointed by the community, in principle I think we ought to.
What does the election or appointment have to do with it? The other teams in the Project are also doing things on your behalf. Why should privacy of decision-making be afforded to those who undemocratically declare themselves a certain function in our Project? Why can you change any thing in this project without needing to proactively explain the thoughts and reasons that led you to make that change, but the Board not? In your role as an openSUSE hero you quite literally have access to servers that could impact the ability of thousands of contributors from contributing at a press of a button. You could delete every mailing-list right now. And their archives. And possibly even the backups. That is far more power with far greater immediate real world impacts on the Project's ability to function than anything the Board could ever decide upon or implement. Why are all openSUSE infra tickets private by default? Why aren't the logs of every thing you type on every openSUSE server public record? Why can't I see the configuration of this mailinglist server? Isn't it because that if all of that information was public, it would increase the risk we have to the servers that you are administering? That's a perfectly reasonable explanation to me. More people with that knowledge means more potential for malevolent individuals to make use of that information to disrupt the Project. Also, as history as sadly taught us, it is highly stressful and in many cases demotivating when the actions you do on a voluntary basis are excruciatingly judged by a wider audience than those actually on the coal face doing the work. We've seen that with the Heroes - heck, I remember more than one occasion that Board members stepped in to try and calm down the mailinglist lynch mobs giving our Heroes a hard time as a result of decisions and actions made by the Heroes in good faith. Given the responsibility they have, and the nature of the internet if everything was public by default, I believe the Heroes decision to do things private by default, while opening as much information as they can, when they can (often after the incident is relevant), is a fair philosophy to follow. And that philosophy is no different from what I've been advocating the whole time throughout this thread. The Board don't fix servers, we fix people. Either as individuals, or as a group, but regardless we are addressing their feelings and concerns. They are trying to do something in the Project and there is no one else for them to turn to, normally because emotions are high, or because finances are involved. or Both. Or because they normally would be able to make a decision on a topic themselves, but because of extenuating circumstances they instead make it the Boards problem. That is another example - on more than one occasion personal factors or mailinglist flamewars have resulted in otherwise empowered contributors feeling demotivated to the point where they outright refuse to make decisions they normally would themselves, and instead turn to the Board to make the decision for them. Such situations can easily be embarrassing for the individuals involved. Shouldn't the Board be trying to make it better for them, not forced to make it worse by airing their shame publicly? Not all contributors contribute to openSUSE under their real-world names, and wish to retain their privacy, and the Board therefore need to handle their requests even more carefully than we handle the others. And then there is also a professional aspect involved. The Board contains at least one SUSE employee and the Project contains many more, many of which are often working on openSUSE as part of their day job. And yet conflicts happen, and the Board's decisions regarding those conflicts can impact those SUSE employees, and their ability to engage with the project like the rest of their peers. In those cases, the ability for the Board to be seen only as "the Board", gives that decision weight and gravitas which helps in any subsequent discussions with SUSE about their employee. And that's just on an inter-personal aspect. If there ever is a meaningful dispute between the openSUSE organisation and SUSE, the level of privacy we currently have in the Board would be even more beneficial. If all of our votes were public, the elected members of the Board who are also SUSE employees could find themselves in a very awkward position, being required to publicly go on record against their employer. There is no way I can imagine that working out well. Currently Board can vote based on what they feel and think personally, not what will go down well publicly, not which will keep them employed, but what they believe they need to vote for the best interest of the Project. As a side effect of the way we currently do things, the votes of the Board collectively carry the weight of _the Project_. If every individual vote can be judged and discussed at the level of detail as you see in this thread, that benefit would vanish. A single individual can make enough noise on a mailinglist or chat room to at least give some the perception that "the Project" disagrees with any decision. This is a fact of life doing things on the internet. Such disputes are a day to day occurrence. And when they happen in openSUSE, as they do, right now people can (and do) turn to the Board to step in, mediate, and when required make a decision, that has the ability to be final partially because of that less-than-wholly-transparent way we decide. If every decision of the Board is open to the level of public flagellation as you see in this thread, I think it's safe to say that no right minded individual will ever volunteer for the Board. It would be a torturous punishment, not a difficult but necessary service provided by volunteers as it currently is. Heck, this thread is continuing despite multiple people calling for it to end. And I would consider this a mostly civilised debate. If only we had a bunch of trusted individuals who could step in and put their foot down to settle this... NOTE: I say this with a Christian-Boltz level of sarcasm. In reality I feel the actions of multiple of us in the Board has effectively forfeit our collective ability to decide on this matter in the way we would decide on other matters. Just as we trust our admins to do their job right without giving us all root access to all the openSUSE infrastructure, I'll continue to feel the best way forward is a model where the Board have an element of privacy in their decision making, while (as we already do) minuting and sharing as much as is possible without compromising our ability to make such decisions. For everyone who disagrees with me after yet-another-stupidly-long-Richard email, I apologise, but I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree, because I really want to honour the wishes of those who called for this thread to end and I really don't want to write another mail on this topic. Cheers, Rich -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org