On Sun, 01 Mar 2020 17:46:02 +1030, Simon Lees wrote:
Firstly as a simple one we don't publish any form of budget, openSUSE has no legal entity therefore we can't have any assets or money so it makes no sense to publish any form of budget currently. openSUSE has no money, currently it just has an agreement that SUSE will provide all the core things it needs. But this is something we'd like to change with a foundation.
That makes sense to me; the thing that makes this a little confusing for me (at least) is that while we don't have any assets/budget, we do have a treasurer who administers the travel program. That's what made me think of it.
openSUSE does have a bunch of rules that you could consider bylaws that we follow. All the ones we follow related to the board including elections, removals the community replacing the board etc can be found at [1]. Rules around membership and the membership officials can be found at [2].
If you have feedback on how you think these could be improved that would be much appreciated as these combined with any items we need to add to comply with legal requirements will likely form the basis of the openSUSE Foundations constitution.
1. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_rules 2. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Members
The challenge for me here is the "could consider bylaws" statement - if one goes looking for the bylaws on the wiki, nothing turns up. It's a bit of a case of "this code is self documenting", which particularly when the foundation setup is complete, will be problematic. I'll make some time this week to do a little research for specifics, but some things that would appear to be needed include: 1. Policies and procedures for what the board does (ie, scope of responsibility) 2. Role definitions and responsibilities (esp. for the foundation, I'd probably expect to see chair/vice-chair/treasurer/secretary/... type roles defined with specific responsibilities) 3. Some guidelines around project governance and accountability to the membership 4. Conflict resolution processes, including both within the membership and within the board It also seems that it would be useful to codify who the liaison with SUSE is for various things. For example, if project members have legal questions, infrastructure questions, or other questions that are better answered by our primary sponsor, rather than it being necessary for the membership to track down "the right person" (and I recognize that often times "the right person" is someone involved in the project), having a point of contact who can facilitate getting those introductions made and conversations set up would be beneficial. (The foundation may well reduce the need for that kind of contact as well.) On a personal note, Simon, I very much appreciate the opportunity to have a respectful conversation about this. Thank you. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org