On 3/15/20 6:39 PM, Simon Lees wrote:
On 3/16/20 1:51 AM, ITwrx wrote:
On 3/15/20 1:07 AM, Simon Lees wrote:
Hi,
Disclaimer, I am on the board, this email is my opinion not that of the board in general. I'm also intentionally choosing to comment only in general rather then on anything specific.
hi,
i'm not an openSUSE member, but am a new user/community member. I'm using openSUSE for current projects, with plans for the future, so i care what happens and am a little concerned with all of this. I think most of the problems demonstrated by recent events, could be reduced by better adherence to the Guiding Principles.
from the guiding principles:
... openness as in open collaboration, open communication, open development, open distribution, open source code, and open mind. and
... transparency of the decision making processes, transparency of communication and transparency of work and collaboration processes. That includes openly answering questions, providing all relevant information, and actively keeping all involved parties informed. We are convinced that a transparent culture whose inner workings can be understood by everybody provides the most efficient and rewarding environment to reach our goals.
Considering the above, I would think that all board meetings and other official business should have recorded video, audio or auto-generated transcripts (as tech allows and at the board's preference) made publicly available (or available to members behind login) on a consistent basis. I've seen other software projects do this, and it seems this would inspire confidence in the project, and promote participation, courtesy, professionalism, fairness and accountability. The current meeting summaries are a good start, but not enough, IMHO. Maybe good enough for the completely public (non-member) account of events, if the project chose to have two tiers.
How are members supposed to be informed voters if they are not allowed to actually get to know the board members' past/current openSUSE legislative, executive, judicial, and behavioral/human interaction record (if you will)? Also, look at what has happened by trying to keep the recent events private. I doubt very seriously, that having the interactions public or member-accessible from the beginning, wouldn't have been better for the project. Just the fact that it would be public, might have changed how things manifested in the first place. Maybe not, idk what happened...
(i don't think the fact that the discord channel could have been joined by anyone is relevant in this context. Participants likely felt it was somewhat private. I'm talking about the difference between how things are handled now, and publishing all official business in full, in a prominent place every time, so people can start consuming it at their leisure, and participants know this will happen, in advance.)
I've never been on any board, so if there are people who think there are good reasons to not make official openSUSE business available to members (seemingly per the Guiding Principles), then an example scenario might be helpful. "Trust us, it's better this way" could be true, but doesn't alleviate concerns very well.
All this being said, i'm not advocating that the current situation gets exacerbated with a No Confidence vote, or retroactively enforce more complete transparency. I'm just suggesting that things might could be clarified and improved going forward, so that this occurrence didn't happen in vain, and might can be avoided in the future. Due to the nature of what we mostly deal with as the board it isn't always possible to make everything public, the board is often presented with ideas or proposals from companies etc that are still under NDA or in many cases most of there employees don't even know. They do this because they value our feedback and input, having to publicly disclose all parts of all meetings would mean the board would no longer be in a
On 3/15/20 2:51 AM, ITwrx wrote: position to provide input on such things and in some cases would lead to the loss of some opportunities for the openSUSE project. I would think these meetings or sections of meetings could be redacted from the record. Perhaps, as long as promises/final decisions weren't being made in private meetings. This is basically the way this currently works.
The second thing is the majority of the project has decided that its best for everyone involved if conflicts between maintainers remain as private as possible at least in most cases which is why the board tends to keep these matters private. This is what i don't understand/disagree with, in the sense that, how/why are these interactions private to begin with? How is this not openSUSE business and taking place on official, public/members-only communication channels to begin with? (if maintainers: openSUSE bug tracker, git repos, etc) How is the current stance not contrary to the Guiding Principles?
If openSUSE business were (mostly) public/members-only, then interactions would tend to be more professional and members would all know when something got out of hand, and all the info would be there for the decision making processes without all of the "cloak and dagger", secret confidentiality agreements that may not hold up under questioning, agonizing over what to *release* (i thought it was open?), possible community fallout, and bad PR for the project. Generally all the people working on openSUSE are pretty good at this and act in a professional manner, ocassionally two or more members might be in disagrement about how to implement a certain feature for example, in these cases its far more efficient for the board to mediate and help the two parties find a solution that hopefully both parties can be happy with. This often works better then posting to a public mailing list and asking every man and his dog for an opinion which has a tendency to descend into flamewars etc, generally if we reach a compromise that both parties accept we tend to move on and not include the issue in detail in our minutes to avoid unnecessary discussions around the topic when a solution has already be found.
Private/personal stuff would actually be private/personal (should never be brought into openSUSE business by third parties, unless maybe there were a protocol for egregious private occurrences), and not actual openSUSE stuff that is being kept from the public/members. What i'm referring to here in this case is more examples where people are not acting professionally within openSUSE communication channels including things like violating the the code of conduct / guiding principles. When this occurs in openSUSE communication channels it is the boards responsibility to address these issues so that other members of the community feel that they can contribute safely. Generally the last thing that someone who has been attacked / abused needs is for this fact to be broadcast to the greater community which is why the board generally doesn't publish all the info in these cases.
Beyond that we try to document as much as possible publicly in our minutes, i'll get back to polishing up the minutes from the last meeting (they got delayed due to holidays, other personal reasons and the board dealing with other things). Thanks for your work, but this is another benefit of just recording the meetings and publishing. Less liability too, as you could always be accused of the minutes being polished a little too well. :) Yep that may be the case sometimes, the current board has decided that it prefers to be able to discuss a large number of options / solutions to problems in private possibly with some of them being quite controversial then ending up in at a point where we have agreement on one solution, while we will always publish the decision and whether it was unanimous or not we sometimes choose not to include every single thing we discussed to reach that point. (Other boards have decided to do slightly different in the past). People have also run for the board in the past saying that they want more transparency and to make everything public then once elected have quickly realised there are some cases were publishing everything isn't the best idea.
At least for the last number of years generally the successful board candidates have been people who are generally pretty active in other parts of the project so while you may not be able to judge a board member on absolutely every decision they make, hopefully you can generally see enough of peoples actions in the general community to decide if you think they would make a good board candidate worth voting for.
Cheers
Fair enough, but that requires more effort to research, where as a member could just watch/listen/read a few meetings, and get a good idea with whom they agree/like. This might be true, but the maximum term for someone on the board is 4 years at a time and people are only reelected every second year which means that generally most of the time the majority of candidates running have not sat on the board before. So to do reasonable research members will always have to look in other places to do research anyway. Although as I said previously most successful candidates are generally pretty involved in the project to start with so many members already have a reasonable idea who they are and whether they would be suitable.
Thanks for your detailed response above.
No problems
ITwrx
Thanks for your responses and letting me say my piece. I leave it to the members and board members to decide how things are. I just felt like i would regret it if i didn't say anything and things went down hill over time. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org