On Saturday, July 13th, 2024 at 2:50 AM, Knurpht-openSUSE <knurpht@opensuse.org> wrote:
Dear all,
Let me first define a couple of things that the community is being faced with:
- Our current governance is not working. With the things we're facing and the current model / Board rules, there is no good way the Board could drive the resulting changes coming up. Bi-weekly meetings will definitely not be enough. Furthermore, the Board has not shown any real proactive leadership in some situations where it should have. In the end, the reason I stepped down from it.
100% agree! What the community has seen from the currently serving Board is less than stellar. Unapologetic, arrogant, barely reactive are the first words that comes to mind that I can personally describe the Board right now. Brushing off obvious Governance violations with a "lets just move on" is absolutely unacceptable, and we as a community should really take this opportunity and better our governance.
- Whether we like it or not, we have to rebrand the Project. We can start working on it now and be proactive, or later be forced by f.e. some new owner of SUSE ( mind, SUSE has expressed their concern about such a thing happening and clearly stated that they do not want to get rid of the Project. ). To drive this we need something else than the Board as it is now. But keeping things as they are simply is an unrealistic option.
- We need more contributors. It is a simple fact that we have been losing those, So, we have to question ourselves not only on how we're getting more people in, but also on how we keep them in. From what I've seen too many of them start enthusiasticly and get burnt out because lack of onboarding / mentoring. That said, I've also seen exceptions to that.
What can we do?
Proposal is a project-team that drives the changes. That project-team should exist of users/contributors/members with ampel experience in the Project/Community, people who know how things currently work. Basically they would come up with a plan, evaluate that with Board and Community and when ready execute the plan. A thing that should be taken into consideration is how f.e. our governance should relate/communicate to/with the Foundation.
Agreed. Just to follow up on your example: The fact that there is barely any communication happening on the foundation is a bit strange. The other thread [1] on this was fairly eye-opening and I think that we got some pretty good answers, but proactivity/transparency would be better. I understand that the Board is not recognizing the Geekos foundation as our official foundation - which was already detailed in the related thread -, but having this clearly communicated towards the community wouldn't hurt.
- The choice of a new name for the Project would best be a limited choice of ~3 names, that that team would have researched/checked, this to avoid having an endless list of non-workable options.
- The rebranding of the distros as f.e. "openSUSE Tumbleweed" to "Tumbleweed" is already an ongoing thing. I don't see any reason to have a discussion about that again.
- A vote on the Project logo has already been done, and was won by our LCP, no need to do that again. The people maintaining the distros have accepted LCP's logos as their distro logo, so using the same design for the Project makes sense since it gives a nice consistency.
Fully agreed, and happy to support this initiative in any way I can! -- Br, A. [1]: https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/project@lists.opensuse.org/thread/Z...