Op donderdag 6 september 2018 06:29:32 CEST schreef Jim Henderson:
On Thu, 06 Sep 2018 09:23:02 +0930, Simon Lees wrote:
On 06/09/2018 08:30, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:43:31 +0200, Christian Boltz wrote:
Hello,
Am Mittwoch, 5. September 2018, 00:21:34 CEST schrieb Jim Henderson:
On Tue, 04 Sep 2018 15:40:29 +0200, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote: But what I'm hearing (no disrespect to any of the board here) is that the board doesn't think the membership can "handle the truth".
I think we are more than capable of handling that information.
Agreed on that, but IMHO you are looking at the wrong problem ;-)
The (IMHO) real problem is that you'll often only know "half of the truth" because we have to keep some aspects private, or simply because the summary in the meeting minutes doesn't include every little detail. (A board meeting usually takes an hour, which is much longer than the minutes which you can read in 3, well, minutes.)
A summary, by definition, isn't a full record of what transpired - so yeah, we understand that. But in cases like this (and I'm thinking of US courts where there's a panel of judges as an example), a "majority opinion" and a "dissenting opinion" are published together. Maybe for issues where it's appropriate, the board could do something like this when there isn't consensus.
In our first couple of meetings as this board there was a couple of topics where we spent more time discussing what we should and shouldn't make public then we actually spent discussing the topic, now that we know where everyone on the board sits with this it doesn't take so long.
We never make things private because we think the "Membership can't handle the truth", sometimes we deal with information that is commercial in confidence for example occasionally a manager within SUSE will share something with us a bit before they make it public knowledge to SUSE employee's. We will generally keep disputes private because we are generally of the view that its in the best interest of the people involved and the community that they are resolved privately. These are generally the only kinds of things the board keeps private, however they are also the kinds of things that the board spends most of its time dealing with.
Thanks, Simon. I hear you on this - unfortunately, from other members of the board, I'm hearing statements that are contrary to yours. Richard's MIB quote is perhaps just a poor attempt at humour.
But as I've said over and over again, from the start - where there are privacy concerns, I have no issue with the discussion (and even in most cases, the outcome) being private. That's only sensible because there are third party privacy concerns.
The same goes with information provided under an NDA (does the board sign an NDA with SUSE? If they don't, perhaps they should for sensitive information like that - then it's possible for SUSE to state "this information is provided under your NDA, please don't share it". I've been covered by NDAs due to my involvement in the Novell/Attachmate/ Microfocus/SUSE/NetIQ/Whomever they are today forums for over 20 years. That works well and makes it really easy to make it unambiguous when information coming from our corporate sponsor is NDA-worthy or embargoed until a public announcement).
Jim I hear / read you, Jim. I can't speak for Richard, but I know I'm maybe sticking too firmly to the privacy matter, giving the impression that I oppose further transparency, which is not the case. Maybe stating that "transparency is a thing that needs to be implemented / handled carefully" would express my feelings better. A thing that still has it's influence on my thinking is a sort of the same situation I was involved in a couple of years ago: to become fully transparent the 'board' of a local volunteer organisation went from 0 to 100% transparency all at once, which damaged the organisation plus a lot of individuals and caused a personal vendetta that's still going on. I'd rather go step by step, and keep the discussion with the community open and ongoing, to get to some well balanced and well documented situation in the end. And well balanced also meaning taking whatever's been suggested in this thread in consideration. I strongly believe that the board cannot do this on their own, i.e. should not be making their own rules to stick to.
-- Gertjan Lettink a.k.a. Knurpht openSUSE Board Member openSUSE Forums Team -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org