-----Original Message----- From: Ronan Chagas [mailto:ronisbr@gmail.com] Sent: 11 February 2018 16:00 To: Richard Brown Cc: opensuse-project Subject: Re: [opensuse-project] Proposal: Reforming openSUSE Membership To Better Reflect Our Ethos Hi Richard,
Em 10 de fev de 2018, à(s) 15:06, Richard Brown
escreveu: 1) Connect is a pain to use - It's unmaintained, and our openSUSE Heroes infra team very much want to stop running the server. 2) Connect is a REAL pain to use - a significant percentage of membership requests do not include any claimed contributions, so the committee cannot verify those contributions and have no choice but to reject them. 3) Connect is an ABSOLUTE pain to use - the membership committee never get notified when there is new application, meaning that applications can often linger for weeks or months before enough vote positively or negatively to accept an application. 4) Connect is an UNGODLY pain to use - anyone reapplying for membership immediately shows up the committees queue with their previous voting score - which has on way too many occasions led to instant-deapproval when the committee didn't realise the person was applying for a second time. (I'm pretty sure this even happened to me, back in the day).
I can’t agree more.
The Board would therefore like to propose a much streamlined Membership scheme for the future. The structure we propose would be something like:
* openSUSE Members will retain all of the rights, benefits, and responsibilities they do today (Voting, Emails/Cloaks Recalling the Board, etc) * Any openSUSE contributor can apply to be a Member * The threshold for Membership will be reduced from "sustained and substantial contribution" to "a contribution and a desire to be a Member" (ie. not every contributor should feel compelled to engage with the Project in this way). * If the contribution can be automatically verified, they will automatically become a Member. (New tooling here will be required, but for example, a quick parse of the public mailinglists would be able to verify a good number of contributions, be they through bug reporting, package contributions, or support on the mailinglists) * If they cannot be automatically verified, they need to be manually verified, but only require a single +1 vote from the Membership committee. * Once becoming a Member, they can remain a member as long as they have an interest in the Project. - If ongoing contributions cease or the contributions cannot be automatically detected, Members will be asked by a bot if they wish to remain a Member.
I liked this proposal, when I submitted my membership, it really took very long to be analyzed that I started to think whether I did something wrong.
Given the nature of this change, the Board would like the feedback and consensus of the Project as a whole. If the overwhelming responses to this post is approval of this approach, then we'd like to see the Project start implementing it post-haste, possibly even before the upcoming next election.
I agree with almost everything here and I think this will make things better.
However, of course, if there is a significant debate to be had, the right way of resolving this might be a vote by the current Membership - this is one of the reasons why this proposal is announced today; After the election problems we had with connect.opensuse.org last year the Board wanted to be sure we had an alternative voting platform available if we need it. Our awesome openSUSE Heroes have just completed confidence tests of one such system, so if we need it, it's available.
A new voting platform for those things will be very nice. However, I would like to see the members more involved in the big decisions related to the distribution. I think we can use this new voting platform so that the members can really help in big decisions. I miss that. The famous naming controversy would be much more defendable if a voting was arranged and 50% of the members accepted it (personally, I did not like the naming initially but now I agree with it). Another option is to turn the decisions into something like enterprise with open capital do. The members will have a percentage of the total “stocks” and the members of the board will have another. Every big decision will be voted concurrently by the board members and the openSUSE member, given the share each one have. Now, what big decisions means is something for another debate :) Well, this is just my 2 cents. Hi All, Just in case, I have just updated my Connect profile. I guess that the board has its own social ML etc. I have a lot of experience with companies 24/24, 7/7, what normally happens is that there are committees/sub committees etc. who do interact and report in a fashionable way. The process can be long, but if everybody plays the game correctly, it can be easy to follow. We just need to remember that we sometimes have a job to do for a living and also contributing to the project should be earmarked and the time allocated for the project should not under-estimated. Otherwise, it becomes a burden. So when it comes to voting, I am inter-alia a Transition Manager, sometimes change is mandatory for an organization to go forward. So be it! Whatever can ease the way we contribute is welcome! At the end of the day, we have a lot of fun, honest :) Jimmy Pierre President NUI.fr -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org