* Richard Brown <rbrown@suse.de> [04-16-24 08:10]:
Dear Project, The latest incident on this list has me questioning the efficacy of the openSUSE Board
...
Simon has continued his mindset of "tolerating intolerance" and advocating for the support and inclusion of people who breach our community standards. This is consistent with his views during the "Rainbow flag" discussions of 9 months ago. His views do not appear to have evolved over those 9 months and I feel should disqualify them from being a Board member. I expressed this view both in my vote and in my campaigning for any-other-candidate in the last election, and intend to continue to do so.
so you take this opportunity to attack an individual who is a board member that has opinions not aligned with your own which you definitely choose to present without call and as publically as possible. ...
The most generous assessment of their involvement in the Board is that they are currently empty chairs.
and more ...
If I was to speculate, based on Gertjan's decision to resign, it would be reasonable to assume that they lean more towards the Simon-side of the debate, making Gertjan's position for strong moderation clearly untenable as a minority opinion.
unsolicited
But we just cannot be sure, because they are effectively absent. If the Board is not going to defend its decisions collectively (and this whole debate was triggered by a Board decision, it was even minuted), then the Board must all be active as individuals.
If the Board fails to step up, either as a collective or as individuals, I do not see how they can effectively serve the Project.
In its current form, I do not see how Project members are expected to respect, honour, or even consider their views more seriously than any other random person in the Project.
-- (paka)Patrick Shanahan Plainfield, Indiana, USA @ptilopteri http://en.opensuse.org openSUSE Community Member facebook/ptilopteri Photos: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/piwigo paka @ IRCnet oftc