On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 2:06 PM, Lars Müller <lmuelle(a)suse.com> wrote: I agree too. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

Le 02/10/2015 14:06, Lars Müller a écrit : the goal is to know better who we are, and on how many people we can count just in case. I didn't plan to make the nominative result public (reason why I keep it on my system), but statistics are great IMHO. for example, my poll "are you an active openSUSE member" got 69 votes. and I don't want, at least in the first place to ask members directly, but try to find evidences of activity. This is very difficult, I know of people representing openSUSE often in booth and with no web activity... jdd -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

We've discussed this repeatedly on this list now the 'scanning' is just the starting point, to reduce the number of people we have to contact directly to find if they are still interested in being an openSUSE Member Anyone who wishes to remain a member, but inactive, will have the opportunity to do so No one will be removed from openSUSE membership automatically, and even in the cases of non-response, anyone who wishes to have their Membership reinstated will be able to Membership is a key part of this projects governance, and the current situation where membership votes have a terrible turn out is not acceptable We need to ensure that those with voting rights in our projects Governance structure have an interest in the project Scanning for activity as the first step, then reaching out to the rest to check if they're still interested, is the way we've chosen to do it Please stop flogging the dead horse and insinuating an impending apocalypse. We've taken great care here to make sure the only people who will loose their voting privileges in the official openSUSE Governance process are only people who don't want to retain that privilege. On 2 October 2015 at 14:18, Mathias Homann <Mathias.Homann(a)opensuse.org> wrote: -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

On Friday 02 October 2015 14:23:55 Richard Brown wrote: Yes, but it seems there is no consensus on the topic, so maybe we do need to discuss this further. To me this is important because it is about the core values of the project, about our openness, and about the question who we want to be part of the project and whom not. Why is that not acceptable? The active people vote, the inactive don't. It makes sense to care about the number of active people. But what does the number of inactive members change? Nothing, because these are the inactive ones. Note that this is a very different kind of governance than elections for a government or similar votes. A government decides for everybody, also for the people who didn't vote. There a strong legitimation by good participation does make a difference. But for openSUSE, which is a volunteer project, and those who don't vote because they are not interested anymore are also not affected by the results of the votes, because they chose to not participate anymore. In such a situation the number of non-voters says nothing else than how much of a history the project had. -- Cornelius Schumacher <cschum(a)suse.de> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

On Friday 02 October 2015 19:27:16 jdd wrote: I think there is a lot we can do to keep them: * Provide a relevant purpose. With Leap we have the best chance since years to do that, to do a distribution which reaches many and new users, a distribution which matters, and not only to the existing core of active contributors. * Offer tasks which are self-contained enough to be done even when you are short of time. Maintaining a package of your favorite software is a good way to do that. We just have to make sure that this is as easy as possible. * Take part in the exciting upstream projects, which attract the people who are drawn to technically interesting projects. We have a good example with docker, where we provide excellent packaging and more (e.g. Portus). If we do this for more, we can keep the people who look for new things. * Have a clear direction. If everybody knows where we go and moves along with all others we create momentum which drags in people who might otherwise stay inactive. We had the discussion about writing down the vision of Leap. That would be one step. * Recognize active people. Do things like the "people of openSUSE" interviews, a commit digest highlighting interesting contributions and who did them, revive the openSUSE weekly news, etc. * Offer a place where people can feel as part of the project, even if they have no time to contribute anymore, and keep the barrier for reentering the active community at zero height. If people have the feeling that they never left and the right task walks by they might pick it up. * Some people simply outgrow the community. They might be kept by addressing them on a different level. One of the typical examples are programmers which become managers, start their own companies, or do a similar career step. They might not be contribute with technical work, but maybe they can help with creating partnerships, organizing events, finding money, or similar things. * Create opportunities to maintain friendships with people in the active community. This could be release parties, hackathons, inviting former contributors as speakers to events, social events at conferences, etc. * And more (insert your ideas here :-) These are just a couple of ideas off the top of my head. I'm sure you have more, and with a bit of refinement they could be turned into activities to address active people, those who want to become active, and those who didn't realize yet, that they want to be active in openSUSE, but still do ;-) -- Cornelius Schumacher <cschum(a)suse.de> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

Le 03/10/2015 02:32, Cornelius Schumacher a écrit : yes, I guess many openSUSE active member do so, but then how can we know about? if they package, we can see an obs account, but if they simply help with doc or any other mean? if you (or every other people) have a clear view of where personal computer will be in say three years, congratulation. I know about leap only from the beginning of the present year (and probably the board knows only some weeks before). It's like life: be prepared :-) yes, this is (and was) very interesting. Anybody ready to do it? we nee a volunteer... be more precise. How can we do that? we give "members" an opensuse mail and IRC cloak, but I have to say I never used them myself (too complicated) to be clear, we *never* prevent people to do anything for openSUSE. We can ask only if we know... yes. This is the goal of, for example, OSC (OpenSuse Conference) and TSP (Travel Support Programm). Any idea on this level is welcome (as in any other level) the goal of any post on any openSUSE mailing list is to trigger ideas :-) thanks jdd -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

  On October 5, 2015 at 8:46:50 AM, Cornelius Schumacher (cschum@suse.de(mailto:cschum@suse.de)) wrote: Did anyone see what I wrote the other day about this subject? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

  On October 5, 2015 at 9:12:23 AM, Cornelius Schumacher (cschum@suse.de(mailto:cschum@suse.de)) wrote: This is what I wrote. Could maybe a solution to this “inactive member vote” idea be to have a smaller set of decisions made by a smaller group? We all understand that the Board is here “to” help the community but “not to” direct the community. Many of us also think that by voting, we are indeed influencing how the project is managed, when in reality the Board feels that they are not really there to steer the project but to be an aid. That indicates having a passive nature to their involvement. We all know that all the members of the Board are active members of the community. Then, why not let the Board vote for its own new addition? My reasoning here would solve some issues: 1, Thinking that by voting you are electing people who are going to champion your ideas about the project 2, Avoid inactive members of the community voting overcoming the vote of the active members 3, Follow an open source idea where the ones that do, decide 4, Help the community in the same way that they do, without getting the perspective that their group leads the project PS: I would say also that we could follow current rules for selecting a candidate and how many periods that person could stay in the Board. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

On 10/05/2015 10:46 AM, Cornelius Schumacher wrote: If you would like, I can help you out with that. SOunds like it would be fun to start it up again :) -- Regards, Uzair Shamim -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

On 10/02/2015 08:32 PM, Cornelius Schumacher wrote: I think the jury on Leap is still out and it may be for a few releases (years) to come. One can argue just as well that Leap, as a new initiative. is papering over the other problem areas we have in the project, insufficient participation in Marketing areas, event organization, documentation, wiki maintenance, you name it. But this is a completely separate discussion from the membership discussion. I also do not think that any discussion about Leap in that direction is helpful to the project as there are very good arguments on both sides. Thus, only time will tell if Leap becomes what many hope it will be. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU Public Cloud Architect LINUX rjschwei(a)suse.com IRC: robjo

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 On 2015-10-03 14:56, Robert Schweikert wrote: I think the worry is about inactive members that do vote ;-) - -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

On 10/04/2015 03:33 AM, jdd wrote: As I understood the process, we are searching for inactive members so that we can ask them if they still wish to be members and if we get no response or they say they no longer wish to be members we are removing them. From that logic a inactive member can still say they wish to be a member and still vote. I didn't read Richard say anywhere that we were going to remove members who said they still wished to be members but aren’t currently contributing. My understanding could be wrong but if its right I don't see what the fuss is about, cleaning up the list to remove people that don't want to be members anymore or that the project can no longer contact. As has been said if they contact the project in the future saying they wish to be members again they will be re added. I agree with Richard cleaning up the list makes alot of sense. Cheers Simon -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

Le 04/10/2015 12:58, Alin Marin Elena a écrit : there is a proposal to makes this more clear https://en.opensuse.org/Members#Maintaining_your_membership I see some reasons, at least: validate the quotas already existing and getting significant statistics about the membership attractiveness, try to understand why people get unactive to see is we can do something to keep them I don't understand this part, sorry jdd -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

On Saturday 03 October 2015 08:56:20 Robert Schweikert wrote: Voting for the board does not influence the direction of the project as by our guiding principles the board does not direct the project: "The board should provide guidance and support existing governance structures, but shouldn't direct or control development, since community mechanisms exist to accomplish the goals of the project." Do you seriously think that this is a problem? Is there any evidence that people who do nothing than voting change the outcome of votes in any way? To me this sounds like a very theoretical argument. Exactly. The other approach is to just let it be. It doesn't create real problems and our energy is much better spent on taking care of the active people and get things done in what we want to deliver to our users. There is no change in our governance structure needed. There is no quorum defined for board elections, so the number of inactive voters doesn't change the results of the election in any way. Additionally there are no rules defined for any other votes by the members. Our community is an informal one governed by the open source process, where consensus and decisions by those who do the work govern the project, not formal votes. It's simply not true that changes to the governance model need a vote. That's not how the openSUSE community is built. Our community is governed by doing, by communication, and by the values outlined in the guiding principles. The board would be well advised to follow its mandate to support the community, its values, and the structures which are there. There is no need for erecting formalities which are neither supposed to be there nor helpful. Better spend your time and energy on wholeheartedly supporting what the community does. And I'm sorry if this discussion drifts into the meta regions of discussing governance of the project. These discussions are harder to do productively and they can't easily be concluded compared to when you just can write a piece of code solving the problem. But they are important, as they help to create clarity about how the community is understanding its values. This is what guides how we work. -- Cornelius Schumacher <cschum(a)suse.de> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

Le 04/10/2015 02:03, Cornelius Schumacher a écrit : but may be the inactive members expected something from us we didn't give, and knowing why they stop being active can help us be better jdd -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

On 4 October 2015 at 02:03, Cornelius Schumacher <cschum(a)suse.de> wrote: Cornelius, While much of what you say is factually correct, I think your interpretation of the status quo is lacking some context Lets take for example the Boards started role - "The board should provide guidance and support existing governance structures, but shouldn't direct or control development, since community mechanisms exist to accomplish the goals of the project." This is something I think we all agree on. I am confident that every Board member strongly believes that the Board should never take a decision away from other contributors who wish to assert that decision. But to extend that as far as you have when you state "voting for the Board does not influence the direction of the Project" couldn't be much further from the truth Sure, in an idealistic utopia, we would have a Project where a) Every volunteer felt empowered, confident, and capable of making decisions and b) Every volunteer agreed with every other volunteer without incident. In reality, neither of those are true, and so we have the Board. Dealing with a), there are many contributors to the Project who seek for additional guidance on what they are doing, or seek a second opinion to challenge or reinforce their own decision. These lists, this community, is often where many of these discussions start, but, as this discussion proves, very often a conclusion or consensus can be unclear. This, if left undealt with, can lead to decision paralysis - no decisions get made because no one can decide what decision needs to be made. The Board, under its role to provide guidance and support, is often turned to in such circumstances. The decisions we make there, in how to guide and support those volunteers, have huge influence in the Project. In the last 3 Boards, I have seen a steady increase on the Board being turned to in this manner. We all saw it en mass with the recent decision regarding the naming and numbering of Leap, where there was clear direction from a majority of people involved in the discussion that they felt the Board should decide, not a Member vote, not a Community-wide vote. And with b) conflict resolution, the Board is our stated conflict resolution body. Conflicts arise all the time, and the decisions the Board makes there in how to resolve those conflicts, also have a huge influence on the direction of the Project. In the long ago past (ie. 3+ years ago), the Board used to avoid stepping in to help resolve conflicts that were of a 'technical' nature. This led to some significant problems, such as certain technical issues lingering around without resolution. After discussing it on these lists the Board decided to no longer excuse itself from such conflicts, and while of course the goal is to always be a mediator and seek a resolution to any issue that is led and agreed upon by the parties involved, as a last resort this places the Board in a situation where it could also make decisions which influence the technical direction of the Project. or to put this very succinctly - while remaining true to the Principles upon which it was founded, the Board today is involved in far more decisions and influence of the Project than the Boards when those Principles were laid out And is that a problem? I think not, but it leads to an interesting constitutional question Who keeps the Board in check? The Board represents the Project, and is meant to be answerable to the Members and the wider openSUSE community. The Members represent the wider/fuller openSUSE community, and have a direct lever of control over the Board, as our rules state "If 20 per cent or more of the openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats. " With the current situation, where a significant number of the openSUSE membership is inactive and not participating in the project in *any* means, then it is significantly harder for those Members who ARE still active in the project to reach that 20% threshold For that reason, and that reason alone, I think the effort to conduct a census on our existing Membership, and remove those who no longer have any interest in the Project, is in the best interest of the Board, the Members, and the whole Community - it's important to have a healthy governance structure. All the other topics around here are food for thought, context, additional concerns, additional issues to consider in the future If you look at the openSUSE governance structure, we're not that dissimilar from many other projects KDE e.V and the GNOME Foundation for example have Boards. These boards are elected by a subset of their wider community, which in both cases call themselves 'Members'. These voting Members have eligibility requirements that require contributions to the Project which are confirmed via a process not dissimilar from ours at openSUSE. I do not think departing from this model, and going to a direction where everyone can vote on everything, would be a healthy option for the Project - we want to ensure that openSUSE has a strong influence in its own direction. A totally open 'everyone can vote on everything in openSUSE even if they have nothing to do with openSUSE' approach would be open to some pretty negative manipulation from parties who might have reason to misdirect the Project. In fact, I think the sensible approach is to actually learn from those other Projects who walk this path, and consider their solutions to our shared problems Both KDE eV and the GNOME Foundation have rules regarding quorums, that sounds like a good idea for us too. I really dislike the current situation where Member votes are often felt to be not representative of the community, because so many of those Members who are meant to represent the community are not voting at all. The perceived 'lack of interest and engagement' from the Membership also discourages use of Member voting in areas where it COULD be considered, such as in some of those decisions where the Board is currently turned to. It would be nice to have a clear, vibrant, voting Membership, which the community can turn to when making tricky decisions. Both KDE e.V and the GNOME Foundation have ongoing activity requirements to maintain your membership - We could do with establishing that, but right now however I think we should just focus on this simple 'one shot' attempt of ensuring the current membership represents those who are currently interested in the Project. Let's figure out the lay of the land, and get our membership rebalanced so we can see an accurate picture of how many active Members we have, how many of them are voting on Board elections, and then we can take things from there. Regards, Richard -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

On 4 October 2015 at 23:06, Cornelius Schumacher <cschum(a)suse.de> wrote: I don't think it is misleading at all, we model ourselves on those well established projects that many of our members also participate in. While openSUSE may not own assets, IIRC we do have legal guarantees that SUSE will not change in any way assets that the project requires (I would need to go through my archives to confirm, but I'm fairly certain of it). I strongly disagree with the assertion that openSUSE is a single vendor community. Yes, SUSE is our Foundational sponsor but this does not preclude any other vendor from participating in whatever shape or form they desire.Just look at the bottom of our homepage. SUSE may influence how things happen, but they by no means dictate what does/does not go on. Yes and it's not only a verbal commitment, and we the Board make sure that they are reminded of that commitment regularly. The role of the openSUSE Board, just as it is with the GNOME/KDE Boards, is to executing the plans, discussions, and desires of the respective communities to the best of the Board's ability. There is no difference there. We may not have the same funding/legal cover as our peers, but we have the same remit - represent our community to the best of our ability. The problem arises when we that are elected by the community, and those within the community, no longer know who our constituents are. We don't have any state/county boundaries to cross, we don't have buses traveling around extolling our virtues. Communities are organic, they grow and shrink; one time our community is a fat healthy caterpillar, next it is a sleek dainty butterfly - neither is better, but both are just as important and crucial. Without taking stock of who is involved how are we all supposed to improve our community and move things forward? To me it sounds like you're trying to bring up the discussion of an official Foundation again, a topic that you were strongly opposed to. Yes we do, and we don't forget it, nor do we try to think it doesn't exist. I like to think that SUSE also knows and doesn't forget our relationship. Whilst discussion is indeed good, let's try and not loose sight of what it is we are discussing. Regards, Andy -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

Richard Brown: [...] If that is the or a problem, openSUSE members might change this rule (by vote) to something like: "If 20 per cent or more of the openSUSE members , or at least a number of openSUSE members that is greater than 50 per cent of the counted voters during the last Board election, require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats." [...] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

Le 04/10/2015 12:06, Robert Schweikert a écrit : yes, that's why I had this initiative. I didn't expect such a discussion, but things may be more clear now. Technical means are a good help, but personal contact when possible is much better, and we badly need non developers members to promote openSUSE jdd -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

On Sunday 04 October 2015 06:06:03 Robert Schweikert wrote: Not at all. From my point of view development includes much more than just programming or packaging or other purely technical aspects. It's about all what is needed to create a product and bring it to users. This includes stuff like marketing, translations, helping users, testing our distributions, giving feedback, organizing events, and much more. Supporting all of this, the technical and the non-technical things, and empowering the people who do it, that's where the magic happens. -- Cornelius Schumacher <cschum(a)suse.de> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org