Thank for the questions Vojtech. I've put my answers below. On 2022-11-07 14:12, Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:

Dne pondělí 7. listopadu 2022 14:01:37 CET, ddemaio napsal(a):

...

Hi all, Per a conversation some of us had at the community meeting last Thursday, we wanted to get discussions for the project started regarding this year's openSUSE Board elections. We listed a few questions in the minutes at https://etherpad.opensuse.org/p/weeklymeeting20221103 You can find some of those questions in the 1103 meeting minutes between lines 48 and line 54. Please ask your questions (Ask us Anything) in this thread so we can keep the conversations focused and centralized for all the candidates and members who want to ask questions of the candidates. All the candidates are in cc and you can find their profiles at the board election wiki. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election

Hi, great idea. I looked up candidates' voting page, they are linked from <https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election#Candidates>, but for some candidates there are more or less only CVs/profiles, for others only election platform (nice, but having also profile page wouldn't hurt). If I should ask question, I'd need to know what the candidates wish to achieve, what they wish to do, what are their plans, etc. :-)

=== what the candidates wish to achieve === I’ve given this question considerable thought and I know my response may be considered controversial to some. I would like to see the community open up to the idea of incorporating blockchain technology into the project’s processes and identity. People of younger generations are operating in this space and learning code related to these areas. If the project actively ignores this generational transition and technology that can bring in new contributors, the project is, in my opinion, making a decision of exclusivity. Every time we go through an election, we need the election officials to go through the membership, set up an instance for elections.opensuse.org, send out the info and process the voting. This could be automated with a smart contract. Having an established system where each member is issued a governance token that allows for them to vote would be more simplistic. Making rules like if the token hasn’t been used in (x) years for example it would be removed and this would keep membership constantly measurable. New membership can be approved by a membership committee with rights to issue a new membership token. This token could also be associated with a badge system (digital collectable/NFTs) recognizing people's contributions similar to how Fedora Badges work. I realize this is not something everyone in the project believes in, but it would be an easy way to incorporate designs and bring in some designers to help with efforts for the project. === what they wish to do === Focus on getting the project to a point where it becomes either a Foundation or make a transition to a decentralized autonomous organization that is built for the next generation of distribution based open source contributors. === What are their plans === Building a framework for a foundation with other interested community members and simultaneously build an alternative DAO option to give members options for a final decision to be made by 2024. v/r Doug

Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> On Mon 2022-11-07, ddemaio wrote:
> > Please ask your questions (Ask us Anything) in this thread so we can 
> > keep the conversations focused and centralized for all the candidates 
> > and members who want to ask questions of the candidates.
> > All the candidates are in cc and you can find their profiles at the 
> > board election wiki. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election
> > This is a great idea (and I meant to ask questions two weeks ago, 
> but ... personal circumstances).
> This may be my most difficult choice in an election as an openSUSE 
> member so far. (A great problem to have, of course.)
> Here are some aspect I am curious to learn more about:
> 1. Why are you running for the openSUSE board? (Some of you have 
> covered this already.)

I’m running for the board because I care about the project and the people, who ultimately are The Project. All projects naturally have tensions, but the people and their differing views are what make a project progress.

> 2. Clearly you care a lot about openSUSE and have contributed to the 
> project. What do you think will you be able to add as a member of the 
> board?

I think I will add a comprehensive view to the board on areas we have not explored as a project. 

> And what would be the opportunity cost, i.e., what might you not be 
> able to do, or do less of, for openSUSE in that case?

Given my platform is about reform, opposing points of view are necessary to make reforms, but there will be a need for other board members willing to not just oppose, but to work with me to allow for the reform. Any unwillingness to help could be a limitation.

> 3. What would you like the board to do differently / more / less of?
> 4. What are your thoughts on an openSUSE Foundation or similar structure?

Absolute reform, I would like to see the project rewrite it’s charter, make use of blockchain technologies and embrace newer ways of doing things, so that we can replenish the project with a succeeding/next generation of members. 

> If positive, how would you address that practically and what, if any, role 
> do you see for yourself in the way there?

I think I already answered this above. 

> 5. What are you biggest worries around / for openSUSE? (And how might we 
> tackle those?)

I would constantly push back against any idea that we should not start incorporate blockchain technologies in future membership processes. I’m afraid that the senior members and newer members are at a crossroads and that a lack of reforms to the project will cause it’s erosion. A vote for me is a vote for reforming the project. My hope is the experienced generation will soon advocate for change because our time is limited, and I’d like for the project to do well after me.


> Bonus question:
> 6. What makes you happy about openSUSE? What do you appreciate, enjoy?

openSUSE Beer & Beer!


> Thank you,
> Gerald

I'm not running (very disappointing, I know), but that doesn't stop me from having an opinion :P On Mon, Nov 28 2022 at 14:12:18 +0100, Richard Brown <rbrown@suse.de> wrote:

We are a project that has historically struggled to run single- instance, centralised infrastructure for key parts of our project operation.

eg. Our members database on https://connect.opensuse.org is no more eg2. Our TSP and voting tooling have both been stories of long struggles by very few people.

We would be much better off sharing as much maintenance burden as possible with other open source projects. We really do not do it enough. The less custom software we deploy, the better. The more maintained the better. For solutions we do already develop, we should be striving to attract as many new contributors and users of that as we can, to attract more contributions coming from more organizations. TravelSupport and quite a few other web apps could be much more of a success story, they really just lacked any maintenance over the years. Blockchain has not proven itself to be a great developer, so I think relying on it to improve this situation is not going to end up fruitful though. We need more hands on deck if we want our great ideas to happen and flourish. LCP [Jake] https://lcp.world/

Am 28. November 2022 18:05:09 MEZ schrieb doug demaio <douglas.demaio@gmail.com>:

I think LCP makes a good point about sharing efforts and something like IPFS might be useful for our purposes.

I wouldn't qualify it as blockchain though. We have had some tries with hosting a mirror on IPFS, but that died fairly quickly. Do you maybe have other ideas where we could use IPFS? The technology is most certainly cool, but I don't really know what kind of data we would be hosting in it LCP [Jake] https://lcp.world/

Hello, Am Montag, 28. November 2022, 14:12:18 CET schrieb Richard Brown:

We are a project that has historically struggled to run single- instance, centralised infrastructure for key parts of our project operation.

eg. Our members database on https://connect.opensuse.org is no more

True, but you should have mentioned that we still have a member database, it's "just" running with a completely different software than we had on connect (Elgg). The problem with Elgg was that it had too many features (most of them unused [1]), and worse, needed custom plugins for managing our Members. Yes, the functionality we used most [2] was custom code, and I probably don't need to mention that this made maintenance hard or even impossible. Therefore we replaced connect with something that is very easy to maintain and does the job: phpMyAdmin ;-) I know this might sound funny, but it follows the KISS principle, and has the big advantage of nearly-zero maintenance effort (install and configure the phpMyAdmin rpm we have in Leap, and enjoy getting maintenance updates). And one more simple database on our database cluster also is basically "for free". The other part of the connect replacement (for requesting membership etc.) is the ticket queue on https://code.opensuse.org/project/membership - also a system we already run and maintain, and one more ticket queue there doesn't hurt. Listing the "loss" of connect as an example that we struggle to run our infrastructure is at best "funny". I'd even argue that replacing it was a big improvement. Regards, Christian Boltz PS: Of course the Heroes are always happy about more people who help to run our infrastructure ;-) [1] for example the built-in social network - there are some big companies that are much better in running a social network, therefore our users never really used that part of connect [2] or should I even say "the only functionality we used"? -- An underappreciated "feature" of web 3 is the self-funding bug bounties. [https://nitter.actionsack.com/lvaughn/status/1487291115904520194]

On Thu, Nov 24, 2022 at 6:58 PM Gerald Pfeifer <gp@suse.com> wrote:

On Mon 2022-11-07, ddemaio wrote:

...

Please ask your questions (Ask us Anything) in this thread so we can keep the conversations focused and centralized for all the candidates and members who want to ask questions of the candidates.

All the candidates are in cc and you can find their profiles at the board election wiki. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election

This is a great idea (and I meant to ask questions two weeks ago, but ... personal circumstances).

This may be my most difficult choice in an election as an openSUSE member so far. (A great problem to have, of course.)

Here are some aspect I am curious to learn more about:

1. Why are you running for the openSUSE board? (Some of you have covered this already.)

2. Clearly you care a lot about openSUSE and have contributed to the project. What do you think will you be able to add as a member of the board?

I'm going to answer these two questions together, since it's hard for me to separate the answers. I'm running for the openSUSE Board because I care a lot about openSUSE and I feel I can help strengthen the Project as a whole. As a board member over the past two years, I've advocated and led with example for increased transparency and accessibility to project governance. We now have a public board tracker[1], board meetings are public by default, and we have more engagement between SUSE and openSUSE than we ever did before (e.g. openSUSE Leap/ALP feature review[2]). [1]: https://code.opensuse.org/board/tickets [2]: https://code.opensuse.org/leap/features

And what would be the opportunity cost, i.e., what might you not be able to do, or do less of, for openSUSE in that case?

Admittedly, I do less code and packaging work than I used to, but I wouldn't attribute that to being a board member. It's more that life has gotten a bit more busy for me in the past couple of years...

3. What would you like the board to do differently / more / less of?

I'd like the board to become more of an advocate for commercial growth of openSUSE. We have a lot to offer to the world, but it's hard when we're not available anywhere or not in the news with partnerships and such. This is where our relationship with SUSE should be able to help us. I'd like for us as a Board to work with SUSE to start establishing relationships with OEMs to broaden the reach of openSUSE. In other words, I'd like to figure out what it will take for us to get OEMs to offer openSUSE Linux as a preload option for their laptops, like Fedora Linux has with Lenovo[3] and Pop!_OS has with the HP Dev One[4]. [3]: https://fedoramagazine.org/lenovo-fedora-now-available/ [4]: https://hpdevone.com/

4. What are your thoughts on an openSUSE Foundation or similar structure? If positive, how would you address that practically and what, if any, role do you see for yourself in the way there?

I think a Foundation is an excellent opportunity for us if we can get it right. We need not only SUSE on board, but a number of other "founding sponsors" with commitments. If we can square that away, then this would be viable. I've talked to many folks over the years who have said that they'd be more willing to work with openSUSE if we had a 501(c)(3)/501(c)(6) or similar. We've had issues with corporate contributors for years because of how openSUSE is governed and owned, fixing that would make things tremendously better if we can garner the support from the wider community. Insofar as what I could do for that, I've got experience working with various community projects in different governance models and my perspective can help shape how we do this for openSUSE.

5. What are you biggest worries around / for openSUSE? (And how might we tackle those?)

I worry about apathy and lack of growth in the project. These are obviously super-existential type issues and there's no straightforward way to do anything about them. But, I hope that my enthusiasm and drive to make the distribution and the project better helps motivate others to do so too.

Bonus question:

6. What makes you happy about openSUSE? What do you appreciate, enjoy?

Things generally work. The engineering is pretty solid. It makes for a pleasant experience. :) -- Neal Gompa (ID: Pharaoh_Atem)