Board Meeting Minutes of August 21 2018. You can also find them in the Wiki: https://en.opensuse.org/Archive:Board_meeting_2018-08-21 Enjoy reading! ;)
= Attendees =
Complete
= openSUSE.Asia Summit retrospective =
Simon and Ana attended openSUSE.Asia Summit two weeks ago and they provided their impressions about the conference to the other board members. The conference was really successfully, incredibly well organized and a community event with lots of volunteers. There were some concerns about the summit being co-hosted with COSCUP and GNOME.Asia, but the fact that this was done keeping the three parts in the same level, made it working pretty well. The openSUSE conference was still well defined, but there was also the chance to interact with the other communities and to get the attention of more new people.
We also spoke about the concerns from the openSUSE Asia community shared during the session with the board the day previous to the conference: Mentoring, translations, etc.
= TSP openSUSE.Asia =
The Board decided to try to improve openSUSE.Asia Summit travel support budget to ensure more people can benefit from it and that students get 100% reimbursement instead of 80%.
There are concerns if there is a procedure for requesting materials and if it is widely known.
ACTION: Ana will double check if the process for that works properly, is documented and will share it
= GSoC =
We discussed how openSUSE will receive the money from GSoC. SUSE will receive it and pay mentors travels for the mentor summit.
= Sponsorships =
== Football team discussion in the last minutes thread ==
We discussed if was appropriated to explain personal points of views on the topic.
== TH Nürnberg ==
openSUSE will sponsor the food of the Linux course for new students in the TH Nürnberg university.
== DevFest'18- VIT Vellore ==
ACTION: Knurpht will write back asking more details
= Update membership information =
ACTION: Richard and Knurpht will try to update the information in the next month
On 2018-08-24 08:32, Ana Martínez wrote:
= Sponsorships =
== Football team discussion in the last minutes thread ==
We discussed if was appropriated to explain personal points of views on the topic.
It is not only appropriate that those personal points of view are expressed... it is *critical*.
The Board positions are elected (other than Richard, who is installed by a corporation). If Board members cannot speak their personal opinions on any (and every) topic, it becomes *pointless* to have elections -- as there would be no way to easily understand the differences between elected officials and hold them accountable to the people who elected them.
Are there any other items Board members are currently forbidden / discouraged from discussing?
-Bryan Lunduke
On 08/24/2018 12:44 PM, Bryan Lunduke wrote:
It is not only appropriate that those personal points of view are expressed... it is *critical*.
The Board positions are elected (other than Richard, who is installed by a corporation). If Board members cannot speak their personal opinions on any (and every) topic, it becomes *pointless* to have elections -- as there would be no way to easily understand the differences between elected officials and hold them accountable to the people who elected them.
Are there any other items Board members are currently forbidden / discouraged from discussing?
-Bryan Lunduke
I agree with this, completely.
Although once voted on, all Board Members should agree to/accept the final decision of the vote, at least until something changes to bring it back to a vote in the future.
However, the whole idea of the democratic process tied to elected Board Members requires that the results of votes and differing personal opinions should be available and transparent to the voters.
Dissenters should still be allowed to express their stand on the issue, but not to a point where it becomes disruptive or dysfunctional.
As voters, we have a right to know where the individual Board Members stand on Board issues.
That is called transparency.
But, please note, my expressing this view is in no way meant to be critical of the Board or anyone on the Board.
Just that I urge the Board to reconsider whether differing views should be public, which I thoroughly believe they should be.
On Sat, 25 Aug 2018 at 03:14, Fraser_Bell Fraser_Bell@opensuse.org wrote:
On 08/24/2018 12:44 PM, Bryan Lunduke wrote:
It is not only appropriate that those personal points of view are expressed... it is *critical*.
The Board positions are elected (other than Richard, who is installed by a corporation). If Board members cannot speak their personal opinions on any (and every) topic, it becomes *pointless* to have elections -- as there would be no way to easily understand the differences between elected officials and hold them accountable to the people who elected them.
Are there any other items Board members are currently forbidden / discouraged from discussing?
-Bryan Lunduke
I agree with this, completely.
Although once voted on, all Board Members should agree to/accept the final decision of the vote, at least until something changes to bring it back to a vote in the future.
However, the whole idea of the democratic process tied to elected Board Members requires that the results of votes and differing personal opinions should be available and transparent to the voters.
Dissenters should still be allowed to express their stand on the issue, but not to a point where it becomes disruptive or dysfunctional.
As voters, we have a right to know where the individual Board Members stand on Board issues.
That is called transparency.
But, please note, my expressing this view is in no way meant to be critical of the Board or anyone on the Board.
Just that I urge the Board to reconsider whether differing views should be public, which I thoroughly believe they should be.
I would like you to consider the following - Board members are individuals elected by a popular vote, with the top 2-3 of any years votes being the new members of the Board
This election model means that upon joining the Board, 1-2 of the Boards new members have the awkward position of feeling that they are everybodies "second favourite" choice
The fact we do every vote transparently means that on a rolling basis, every Board member has a perception of their popularity (or lack of it) compared to their peers in the Board
And yet, we (the Project) need the Board to act like a group of equals. They can't do that if they are having to worry about that popularity skew from the election.
I wholeheartedly agree that, just like the Project needs to be an environment that supports dissent. The Board needs to be an environment that supports dissent too. I like the fact that the current Board is full of passionate members and we manage to fill a whole hour every week seeking agreement on the topics we're discussing. But the Board's ability to function in it's roles of decision makers of last resort, or arbitrator of disputes, is severely impacted if the Board cannot be seen to be a unified body. Or else every decision can easily be picked apart by people playing political games of divide and conquer. Any decision in any dispute, normally the most agonising and difficult decisions we make given they can impact someone's ability to remain part of the Project, risks its credibility undermined if the long, arduous deliberations we put into such things were always made public.
The Project is one that is run by the general principle of "those who do, decide" - everything we do is do-ocratic, but also somewhat democractic, as we operate in an environment of respect, shared consent as outlined in the Projects Guiding Principles. The Board plays a necessary role on being the only body that can, and must, act when that general open operating procedure doesn't apply. We need to make ugly decisions in uncomfortable circumstances. Internally that means we HAVE to have the same openness and equality that you see in the rest of the Project, but when a decision is made the only way they are likely to stick in any meaningful way is if they are exercised as a collective. Only the Board, and not any one individual in the Board, has the collective mandate of the Project's membership.
In my long years, I've seen this from multiple sides. I've been the dissenting Board member on more decisions than I can count, and given my position as Chairman I disproportionally have the unusual privilege of being the one presenting such decisions to you all. I hope the vast majority of the time none of you ever had any suggestion that I did not wholeheartedly agree with the decisions which internally I had fought long and hard against. I do not regret any of the times I have hidden my personal distaste for a decision from the Board, because I wholeheartedly believe that the collective decision of the Board, not my personal opinion, was the right decision for the Project. In the few times when those decisions received negative feedback along the lines of my objections, I kept my council to the Board, and used the opportunity to reinforce why I had objected. There would have been no benefit of me joining the angry mob in the mailinglists. By acting in this way, I'm confident the projects feedback and my own combined into the collective decision making process for future decisions, with the least disruption for the Project on a day to day basis.
I've also seen dissenting Board members threaten to airing their dissent publicly during the decision making process, in what I felt was a naked effort to change the decisions of their peers. This was a behaviour I find grossly distasteful and I greatly appreciate our general principle of the Board presenting all of our decisions collectively as an effort to suppress such toxic behaviour.
That said, I totally get transparency is important, and support it.
Therefore, when relevant, there has been times in the past and I expect their will be in the future, when the decision of the Board comes into question, and the fact that one or more Board members dissented is relevant to the discussion. In those cases, there is nothing preventing the Board from describing the internal disputes behind their decision in abstract.
So taking the soccer club sponsorship decision as an example. When the feedback started coming in questioning the decision, I would have strongly supported any Board member taking the opportunity to give the project a 'peek behind the curtain' about the decision making process. A general overview of what the prevailing topics of discussion were, what points primarily led to the decision, AND sharing the fact that the _Board_ was not unanimous and that there was dissenting views, would have been a great addition to the thread and the discussion.
And sure, if Ana had been the one telling the Project in abstract that one person had objected to the decision, some conspiracy theorists might have put 2+2 together and guessed right this time that Ana was the one objecting.
But it would be a guess - theres been times I've shared details of dissent in the Board when it wasn't me dissenting, and like I imply above, its something which I think every Board member should feel empowered to do. The community deserves to know the Board is as diverse as it is and agonises at length over the decisions it makes.
But by handling it in abstract (eg. "one/some Board members disagreed and this is how I'd describe their view..." vs "_$FOO_ disagreed and feels xyz") is the only way I think we can strike a balance between keeping the Project informed about what we're doing and how we're doing it, without undermining the impact and value of the decisions we make as a result.
If every individuals personal view was aired constantly on the lists, I fear it would turn the Board into more of a reality-show drama and less of a necessary decision making function in the Project.
Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 21:44:14 CEST schreef Bryan Lunduke:
On 2018-08-24 08:32, Ana Martínez wrote:
= Sponsorships =
== Football team discussion in the last minutes thread ==
We discussed if was appropriated to explain personal points of views on the topic.
It is not only appropriate that those personal points of view are expressed... it is *critical*.
The Board positions are elected (other than Richard, who is installed by a corporation). If Board members cannot speak their personal opinions on any (and every) topic, it becomes *pointless* to have elections -- as there would be no way to easily understand the differences between elected officials and hold them accountable to the people who elected them.
Are there any other items Board members are currently forbidden / discouraged from discussing?
-Bryan Lunduke
I completely disagree here, Bryan, and I consider your post as trolling. You know very well how it works and has worked. We did not discuss whether or not we have personal opinions, we discussed ventilating disagreement with decisions democraticly taken. As you know any board member can suggest to ask the community and let them vote, but the community chooses the board to facilitate decision making. Also, the board operates as a team. Would you accept team members that question any decision that was voted on?
This board is trying to be more transparant in communication through the minutes. I will discourage ( can't forbid, nobody can and you know that ) any mentioning of persons where it considers conflict resolution f.e. . I will also discourage to publish nasty conflicts inside the board with ugly member behaviour, as an other example.
You yourself have lived the Board and have every time it was discussed agreed to keep certain things private, and now after eight months of silence from your side this? Come on, disappointing.
Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 03:13:46 CEST schreef Fraser_Bell:
On 08/24/2018 12:44 PM, Bryan Lunduke wrote:
It is not only appropriate that those personal points of view are expressed... it is *critical*.
The Board positions are elected (other than Richard, who is installed by a corporation). If Board members cannot speak their personal opinions on any (and every) topic, it becomes *pointless* to have elections -- as there would be no way to easily understand the differences between elected officials and hold them accountable to the people who elected them.
Are there any other items Board members are currently forbidden / discouraged from discussing?
-Bryan Lunduke
I agree with this, completely.
Although once voted on, all Board Members should agree to/accept the final decision of the vote, at least until something changes to bring it back to a vote in the future.
However, the whole idea of the democratic process tied to elected Board Members requires that the results of votes and differing personal opinions should be available and transparent to the voters.
Dissenters should still be allowed to express their stand on the issue, but not to a point where it becomes disruptive or dysfunctional.
As voters, we have a right to know where the individual Board Members stand on Board issues.
That is called transparency.
But, please note, my expressing this view is in no way meant to be critical of the Board or anyone on the Board.
Just that I urge the Board to reconsider whether differing views should be public, which I thoroughly believe they should be.
No, disagree. Once voted on, an item should be re-opened where it was discussed before. Then, the board can easily decide to ask the community. See my reply to Bryan.
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 21:44:14 CEST schreef Bryan Lunduke:
On 2018-08-24 08:32, Ana Martínez wrote:
= Sponsorships =
== Football team discussion in the last minutes thread ==
We discussed if was appropriated to explain personal points of views on the topic.
It is not only appropriate that those personal points of view are expressed... it is *critical*.
The Board positions are elected (other than Richard, who is installed by a corporation). If Board members cannot speak their personal opinions on any (and every) topic, it becomes *pointless* to have elections -- as there would be no way to easily understand the differences between elected officials and hold them accountable to the people who elected them.
Are there any other items Board members are currently forbidden / discouraged from discussing?
-Bryan Lunduke
I completely disagree here, Bryan, and I consider your post as trolling. You know very well how it works and has worked. We did not discuss whether or not we have personal opinions, we discussed ventilating disagreement with decisions democraticly taken.
I have to agree with Bryan. A board does not operate as a team. The individual members are appointed or elected because of their individual charm/ability/following/haircolour/experience/outlook/whatever. It is very important that the elected members remain true to that. It is the main thing they bring to the party. If a board member disagrees with a democratic decision, it is perfectly fine to point that out. Isn't it quite simply this - when I disagree with a decision made by the board, I would like to know that the board member I elected also disagreed?
Would you accept team members that question any decision that was voted on?
Certainly. I would. Professionally, I am a board member in other places. We don't operate as a team, we are there to govern a company based on our personal experiences, opinions and outlook. When a board operates as a team, you only have to look at Raiffeisen Schweiz to see how bad it can go. Or even my local football club.
On 2018-08-25 00:22, Richard Brown wrote:
I would like you to consider the following - Board members are individuals elected by a popular vote, with the top 2-3 of any years votes being the new members of the Board
This election model means that upon joining the Board, 1-2 of the Boards new members have the awkward position of feeling that they are everybodies "second favourite" choice
Correct. That's how every election -- in every industry/government across the globe -- works. If someone doesn't want to "come in second" they don't run for office.
Even popular people lose. Just how it works. That's life.
And yet, we (the Project) need the Board to act like a group of equals. They can't do that if they are having to worry about that popularity skew from the election.
What you are saying here is that you don't feel the openSUSE Board can function if the elected board members are considering the views and needs of those that voted them into office.
That is super-duper-off-the-charts wrong.
The Board needs to be an environment that supports dissent too. I like the fact that the current Board is full of passionate members and we manage to fill a whole hour every week seeking agreement on the topics we're discussing.
Good. We are in agreement there. Let's encourage dissent and transparency. This is good for all.
But the Board's ability to function in it's roles of decision makers of last resort, or arbitrator of disputes, is severely impacted if the Board cannot be seen to be a unified body.
This is also true of every government. Dissent in government impacts the ability force their will on the constituents. Yet we're not a fan of dictatorships.
Any decision in any dispute, normally the most agonising and difficult decisions we make given they can impact someone's ability to remain part of the Project, risks its credibility undermined if the long, arduous deliberations we put into such things were always made public.
You are fundamentally wrong there. By this logic there is no point in having an elected Board at all. Might as well simply have one single, all-powerful role that nobody can disagree with.
I've also seen dissenting Board members threaten to airing their dissent publicly during the decision making process, in what I felt was a naked effort to change the decisions of their peers. This was a behaviour I find grossly distasteful and I greatly appreciate our general principle of the Board presenting all of our decisions collectively as an effort to suppress such toxic behaviour.
It shouldn't need to be a threat. Things should simply be public and transparent within the openSUSE Board. Keeping things "secret" and "controlled" is, in my opinion, far more toxic for such an organization.
That said, I totally get transparency is important, and support it.
Good. Do it. Always.
So taking the soccer club sponsorship decision as an example. When the feedback started coming in questioning the decision, I would have strongly supported any Board member taking the opportunity to give the project a 'peek behind the curtain' about the decision making process.
I'm getting some mixed signals here, my friend. :)
Just a few days ago you chastised others for being public about Board decisions:
"Replying a little seriously, and to justify my vote publicly (which is something I shouldn't have to do, given the Board's rule that decisions made collectively are defended collectively, but someone seems to have forgotten that... :-/ )" - Richard Brown, Tuesday
And sure, if Ana had been the one telling the Project in abstract that one person had objected to the decision, some conspiracy theorists might have put 2+2 together and guessed right this time that Ana was the one objecting.
It really shouldn't be theorizing. Just be public, no problems in trying to work so hard to keep things secret.
The community deserves to know the Board is as diverse as it is and agonises at length over the decisions it makes.
Totally! Agreed! Transparency helps that. Just give in to openness. :)
If every individuals personal view was aired constantly on the lists, I fear it would turn the Board into more of a reality-show drama and less of a necessary decision making function in the Project.
Meh. Maybe. Democracy (in all forms) is messy. You can accept that messiness is part of it, or fight it to try to be a secrecy-filled form of governing.
-Bryan Lunduke
On 2018-08-25 03:56, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
You yourself have lived the Board and have every time it was discussed agreed to keep certain things private, and now after eight months of silence from your side this? Come on, disappointing.
This is 100% true.
And I am greatly disappointed in myself for not pushing for greater transparency during my tenure on the openSUSE Board. I voiced my thoughts on it a few times... but I should have pushed harder and made a point of publishing details to the members of the community. That I did not do this is a failing on my part.
You'll note that I *very* rarely speak up on openSUSE actions -- even when I disagree with them. Only when I think it's critically important.
-Bryan Lunduke
On Sat, 25 Aug 2018 at 20:52, Bryan Lunduke bryan@lunduke.com wrote:
On 2018-08-25 00:22, Richard Brown wrote:
I would like you to consider the following - Board members are individuals elected by a popular vote, with the top 2-3 of any years votes being the new members of the Board
This election model means that upon joining the Board, 1-2 of the Boards new members have the awkward position of feeling that they are everybodies "second favourite" choice
Correct. That's how every election -- in every industry/government across the globe -- works. If someone doesn't want to "come in second" they don't run for office.
Even popular people lose. Just how it works. That's life.
But the Board is not 'running for office' in a sense that can be considered analogous to any industry or government.
openSUSE Board Members are not empowered to create laws or sign orders which others are duty bound to follow
Especially when you consider our primary role being one of dispute resolution and judgement, we have more in common with Jurors than company Board Members or Elected politicans
So taking the soccer club sponsorship decision as an example. When the feedback started coming in questioning the decision, I would have strongly supported any Board member taking the opportunity to give the project a 'peek behind the curtain' about the decision making process.
I'm getting some mixed signals here, my friend. :)
Just a few days ago you chastised others for being public about Board decisions:
"Replying a little seriously, and to justify my vote publicly (which is something I shouldn't have to do, given the Board's rule that decisions made collectively are defended collectively, but someone seems to have forgotten that... :-/ )" - Richard Brown, Tuesday
And you are either acting intentionally obtuse or don't notice the huge monumental difference between a situation where Board members are required to stand up publicly as individuals and justify their decision in public, and a situation where the Board collectively owns both the decision "we as a group feel X" and the dissent "but a number in our group also felt Y"
The Project elected a Board to do a specific job. We're not Board members as part of some political or business exercise, but to serve the Project in a very specific way, doing an often ugly job so no one else has to.
This has an analogue in juries around the world, an equally thankless task, but important one. One where the words and statements of jurors made during their deliberations cannot be made public.
The outcome of that deliberation, the decision of guilt or innocence, and the number of jurors for and against a decision are shared as an output of those deliberations, but the deliberations themselves are sacrosanct and forbidden from being aired in any court in order to ensure that those decisions can be made without any fear of external influence.
The Board have been elected to a position where they are the final arbiters of any decision that gets to their desk. If an issue gets to their desk it can be argued that it only does so because no other contributor was willing or able to make the decisions via our usual (very public) means. We are after all, decision makers and arbiters of last resort - the community should be taking care of any issue that it can long before it ever ends up needing a Board decision.
I think it is therefore highly important that those decisions which are trusted to the Board, are conducted in a way that empowers each Board member to act on their conscious, without fear of public reprisals after the fact.
Hence, the model I strongly advocate for in my posts and the model which every openSUSE Board has generally operated under since at least my involvement, and I suspect long before.
If the Project wishes to fundamentally change the role and purpose of the Board then I'd be willing to see that go to a Membership vote. But the absolute transparency you seem to advocate for, would not get my vote - if such an idea is popular, I would suggest the Board as we know it would be pointless - we might as well have anyone and everyone making every decision in public. There would be no point having elections to entrust specific people with the additional responsibility of arbitrating disputes and making decisions which no one else was able to make. I think such a situation would dramatically decrease the Project's ability to deal with sponsors - They often require, for practical and financial reporting reasons, to be able to discuss any potential sponsorship with an element of privacy. Such discussions could never happen without a trusted body like a Board capable of having such discussions in private. And on the more common situation of the Board dealing with disputes between contributors, either absolute transparency or the dissolution of the Board would mean the only way of dealing with such situations would be public trials. Which I can only imagine how badly that would end up, no matter how they were structured.
The Board serves an important role in the Project. It needs an element of privacy to accomplish that role, much in the same way that Jurors do. It also needs the trust of the Project, which is why members are selected in the way that they are. I think that trust is best served by the Board operating as a cohesive unit, collectively given a broad mandate by the Project, rather than as an unstructured gaggle of individuals all seeking to build their own personal reputations for their own personal gain. Sure, my view of Board work is often selfless and thankless, and it's true, doing things more publicly could build superstar heroes out of some Board members, and pantomime villains out of others. But the Board isn't here to be a reality-side-show for the Project, we have a job to do, and we need an environment that allows us to do that job effectively.
Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 20:09:20 CEST schreef Per Jessen:
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 21:44:14 CEST schreef Bryan Lunduke:
On 2018-08-24 08:32, Ana Martínez wrote:
= Sponsorships =
== Football team discussion in the last minutes thread ==
We discussed if was appropriated to explain personal points of views on the topic.
It is not only appropriate that those personal points of view are expressed... it is *critical*.
The Board positions are elected (other than Richard, who is installed by a corporation). If Board members cannot speak their personal opinions on any (and every) topic, it becomes *pointless* to have elections -- as there would be no way to easily understand the differences between elected officials and hold them accountable to the people who elected them.
Are there any other items Board members are currently forbidden / discouraged from discussing?
-Bryan Lunduke
I completely disagree here, Bryan, and I consider your post as trolling. You know very well how it works and has worked. We did not discuss whether or not we have personal opinions, we discussed ventilating disagreement with decisions democraticly taken.
I have to agree with Bryan. A board does not operate as a team.
With Bryan it didn't, no. But in cases as our community it should, or it should go out and tell the voters it can't function like this.
The individual members are appointed or elected because of their individual charm/ability/following/haircolour/experience/outlook/whatever. It is very important that the elected members remain true to that. It is the main thing they bring to the party.
And that's exactly what I'm doing here.
If a board member disagrees with a democratic decision, it is perfectly fine to point that out.
That is not the issue. If the board, as a democratic entity, votes, the result is that of the board, not of individuals. Whenever a member disagrees and wants to post about it, it's nothing more than decent to state that a personal statement is made. That's one of the consequenses of being a board member, having two hats.
Isn't it quite simply this - when I disagree with a decision made by the board, I would like to know that the board member I elected also disagreed?
Of course, but that should be a statement from Per Jessen, community member, not Per Jessen, Board member.
Would you accept team members that question any decision that was voted on?
Certainly. I would. Professionally, I am a board member in other places. We don't operate as a team, we are there to govern a company based on our personal experiences, opinions and outlook. When a board operates as a team, you only have to look at Raiffeisen Schweiz to see how bad it can go. Or even my local football club.
A company != a community. And I don't care about examples of things going wrong. If you think we're on the wrong track, gather the crowd and bring down the board as an ultimate measure.
On 2018-08-25 13:01, Richard Brown wrote:
Correct. That's how every election -- in every industry/government across the globe -- works. If someone doesn't want to "come in second" they don't run for office.
Even popular people lose. Just how it works. That's life.
But the Board is not 'running for office' in a sense that can be considered analogous to any industry or government.
openSUSE Board Members are not empowered to create laws or sign orders which others are duty bound to follow
Especially when you consider our primary role being one of dispute resolution and judgement, we have more in common with Jurors than company Board Members or Elected politicans
This is incorrect.
The openSUSE Board also makes budgetary decisions, endorsement decisions (and policies / plans), coordination with other organizations (and individuals), event planning, and even decisions of who will (or won't) be allowed to be members of openSUSE (or utilize openSUSE resources).
The "jury" comparison you make is absolutely accurate... for a very small portion of what the openSUSE Board does.
I'm getting some mixed signals here, my friend. :)
Just a few days ago you chastised others for being public about Board decisions:
"Replying a little seriously, and to justify my vote publicly (which is something I shouldn't have to do, given the Board's rule that decisions made collectively are defended collectively, but someone seems to have forgotten that... :-/ )" - Richard Brown, Tuesday
And you are either acting intentionally obtuse or don't notice the huge monumental difference between a situation where Board members are required to stand up publicly as individuals and justify their decision in public, and a situation where the Board collectively owns both the decision "we as a group feel X" and the dissent "but a number in our group also felt Y"
I'll just move past the out-of-left-field personal attacks...
The Board have been elected to a position where they are the final arbiters of any decision that gets to their desk. If an issue gets to their desk it can be argued that it only does so because no other contributor was willing or able to make the decisions via our usual (very public) means.
Somewhat correct.
This sort of process is not entirely unlike many forms of government (such as in the USA) where the higher levels handle the items that the lower levels either haven't, or chose not to tackle themselves (City/County/State/Federal).
That said, the openSUSE Board also tackles items that do not first come in front of the broader openSUSE membership. Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Either way, this is fine (as the Board is elected to handle such things)... but it is entirely not like Juries in any real way.
I think it is therefore highly important that those decisions which are trusted to the Board, are conducted in a way that empowers each Board member to act on their conscious, without fear of public reprisals after the fact.
I get it. Your position is that a person in an elected position should be able to carry out their duties in secret -- and people who voted for them have no right to know how they vote or what their options are.
That's weird to me. I see your point, I simply disagree with it on a very core level.
If the Project wishes to fundamentally change the role and purpose of the Board then I'd be willing to see that go to a Membership vote.
Yes. I think this would be good. Simply make the votes public. That's all. Every vote taken by the openSUSE Board -- on *every* issue -- should be made public. That way, when the next election occurs, the openSUSE membership can make an informed decision on who to elect (or re-elect) to best represent us.
But the absolute transparency you seem to advocate for, would not get my vote - if such an idea is popular, I would suggest the Board as we know it would be pointless - we might as well have anyone and everyone making every decision in public.
That's ok. I respect your thoughts here. I believe you would be out-voted by the membership by a rather wide margin.
Anyone else want the votes of Board members to be public? Having a simple vote on this would seem to me to be an easy way to settle this (without the whole name-calling thing).
-Bryan Lunduke
For anybody reading this post:
I'm posting this as a private person, see my adjusted signature, and definitely not as an openSUSE Board Member. I've tried to post a neutral piece of content, but am aware that I'm emotianal about this, since Bryan was a Board member, though his activities were virtually zero.
Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 23:16:07 CEST schreef Bryan Lunduke:
On 2018-08-25 13:01, Richard Brown wrote:
Correct. That's how every election -- in every industry/government
across the globe -- works. If someone doesn't want to "come in
second"
they don't run for office.
Even popular people lose. Just how it works. That's life.
F*ck popular, that's your perception, not mine. Sorry if your's is such, being elected for what you do instead of popularity to me looks less stressful
But the Board is not 'running for office' in a sense that can be
considered analogous to any industry or government.
openSUSE Board Members are not empowered to create laws or sign orders
which others are duty bound to follow
Especially when you consider our primary role being one of dispute
resolution and judgement, we have more in common with Jurors than
company Board Members or Elected politicans
This is incorrect.
The openSUSE Board also makes budgetary decisions, endorsement decisions
(and policies / plans), coordination with other organizations (and
individuals), event planning, and even decisions of who will (or won't)
be allowed to be members of openSUSE (or utilize openSUSE resources).
The "jury" comparison you make is absolutely accurate... for a very
small portion of what the openSUSE Board does.
I'm getting some mixed signals here, my friend. :)
Just a few days ago you chastised others for being public about Board
decisions:
"Replying a little seriously, and to justify my vote publicly (which
is
something I shouldn't have to do, given the Board's rule that
decisions made collectively are defended collectively, but someone
seems to have forgotten that... :-/ )" - Richard Brown, Tuesday
And you are either acting intentionally obtuse or don't notice the
huge monumental difference between a situation where Board members are
required to stand up publicly as individuals and justify their
decision in public, and a situation where the Board collectively owns
both the decision "we as a group feel X" and the dissent "but a number
in our group also felt Y"
I'll just move past the out-of-left-field personal attacks...
The Board have been elected to a position where they are the final
arbiters of any decision that gets to their desk.
If an issue gets to their desk it can be argued that it only does so
because no other contributor was willing or able to make the decisions
via our usual (very public) means.
Somewhat correct.
This sort of process is not entirely unlike many forms of government
(such as in the USA) where the higher levels handle the items that the
lower levels either haven't, or chose not to tackle themselves
(City/County/State/Federal).
That said, the openSUSE Board also tackles items that do not first come
in front of the broader openSUSE membership. Sometimes yes. Sometimes
no. Either way, this is fine (as the Board is elected to handle such
things)... but it is entirely not like Juries in any real way.
I think it is therefore highly important that those decisions which
are trusted to the Board, are conducted in a way that empowers each
Board member to act on their conscious, without fear of public
reprisals after the fact.
I get it. Your position is that a person in an elected position should
be able to carry out their duties in secret -- and people who voted for
them have no right to know how they vote or what their options are.
That's weird to me. I see your point, I simply disagree with it on a
very core level.
If the Project wishes to fundamentally change the role and purpose of
the Board then I'd be willing to see that go to a Membership vote.
Yes. I think this would be good. Simply make the votes public.
That's
all. Every vote taken by the openSUSE Board -- on *every* issue --
should be made public. That way, when the next election occurs, the
openSUSE membership can make an informed decision on who to elect (or
re-elect) to best represent us.
But the absolute transparency you seem to advocate for, would not get
my vote - if such an idea is popular, I would suggest the Board as we
know it would be pointless - we might as well have anyone and everyone
making every decision in public.
That's ok. I respect your thoughts here. I believe you would be
out-voted by the membership by a rather wide margin.
Anyone else want the votes of Board members to be public?
Come on. So every board member can be attacked personally by you or the rest of the world? How the f*ck are we going to have board members if they can be social-media-killed after producing minutes. Dude, you're missing the point here completely.
Having a
simple vote on this would seem to me to be an easy way to settle this
(without the whole name-calling thing).
-Bryan Lunduke
This is really crossing my lines, Bryan. Sorry to say so, and I've kept quiet about some things so far, only because of my own principles of decency, But you are the one asking for transparancy:
You, and no one else, were the one that threatened the other Board members to go public in your youtube etc, channels, if they would not follow your opinion. Threatened with going public on your channels. Threatened, no other word. As a Board Member at the time, you twisted our arms behind our backs, ready for cufs. You, as a Board Member. That was the kind of democracy you showed me, and what the 'disappointment' phrasing was for. Don't worry about me, you can kill my reputation where ever you want, I don't care. Threaten me personally like that, please,
But, do not ever retry this on me again. I'm still feeling hurt by that coming from a self proclaimed free and open source person, where I thought free and open source wouldn't need such tactics, and certainly you personally wouldn't.
I'm getting some mixed signals here, my friend. :)
On a personal note: Bryan, please leave us alone. We'll do fine without your interference. The openSUSE Project is about openSUSE, not about Bryan Lunduke.
If you think this needs some discussion, feel free to email me, but, come to think if it, rather reply to this list first, but still feel free to contact me.
Whoah. Yikes.
I'm simply suggesting transparency is good in this organization.
You bring up an example -- while attacking me, personally -- where I wanted to be public about things and *some* people did not want to be public. And you didn't like that (apparently).
This is getting nasty and it really doesn't need to. Let's just take a breath. I never attacked you. I never threatened you. I'll just ignore the words you wrote below so we can move forward.
I still suggest a vote by the members to see if, going forward, it would be beneficial to have individual Board Member votes -- on any given topic -- be made public. If the membership of openSUSE doesn't want that... then that's settled. If we do want that... then that's easy to implement and shouldn't be a big deal.
-Bryan Lunduke
On 2018-08-25 15:31, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
For anybody reading this post:
I'm posting this as a private person, see my adjusted signature, and definitely not as an openSUSE Board Member. I've tried to post a neutral piece of content, but am aware that I'm emotianal about this, since Bryan was a Board member, though his activities were virtually zero.
Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 23:16:07 CEST schreef Bryan Lunduke:
On 2018-08-25 13:01, Richard Brown wrote:
Correct. That's how every election -- in every industry/government
across the globe -- works. If someone doesn't want to "come in
second"
they don't run for office.
Even popular people lose. Just how it works. That's life.
F*ck popular, that's your perception, not mine. Sorry if your's is such, being elected for what you do instead of popularity to me looks less stressful
But the Board is not 'running for office' in a sense that can be
considered analogous to any industry or government.
openSUSE Board Members are not empowered to create laws or sign orders
which others are duty bound to follow
Especially when you consider our primary role being one of dispute
resolution and judgement, we have more in common with Jurors than
company Board Members or Elected politicans
This is incorrect.
The openSUSE Board also makes budgetary decisions, endorsement decisions
(and policies / plans), coordination with other organizations (and
individuals), event planning, and even decisions of who will (or won't)
be allowed to be members of openSUSE (or utilize openSUSE resources).
The "jury" comparison you make is absolutely accurate... for a very
small portion of what the openSUSE Board does.
I'm getting some mixed signals here, my friend. :)
Just a few days ago you chastised others for being public about Board
decisions:
"Replying a little seriously, and to justify my vote publicly (which
is
something I shouldn't have to do, given the Board's rule that
decisions made collectively are defended collectively, but someone
seems to have forgotten that... :-/ )" - Richard Brown, Tuesday
And you are either acting intentionally obtuse or don't notice the
huge monumental difference between a situation where Board members are
required to stand up publicly as individuals and justify their
decision in public, and a situation where the Board collectively owns
both the decision "we as a group feel X" and the dissent "but a number
in our group also felt Y"
I'll just move past the out-of-left-field personal attacks...
The Board have been elected to a position where they are the final
arbiters of any decision that gets to their desk.
If an issue gets to their desk it can be argued that it only does so
because no other contributor was willing or able to make the decisions
via our usual (very public) means.
Somewhat correct.
This sort of process is not entirely unlike many forms of government
(such as in the USA) where the higher levels handle the items that the
lower levels either haven't, or chose not to tackle themselves
(City/County/State/Federal).
That said, the openSUSE Board also tackles items that do not first come
in front of the broader openSUSE membership. Sometimes yes. Sometimes
no. Either way, this is fine (as the Board is elected to handle such
things)... but it is entirely not like Juries in any real way.
I think it is therefore highly important that those decisions which
are trusted to the Board, are conducted in a way that empowers each
Board member to act on their conscious, without fear of public
reprisals after the fact.
I get it. Your position is that a person in an elected position should
be able to carry out their duties in secret -- and people who voted for
them have no right to know how they vote or what their options are.
That's weird to me. I see your point, I simply disagree with it on a
very core level.
If the Project wishes to fundamentally change the role and purpose of
the Board then I'd be willing to see that go to a Membership vote.
Yes. I think this would be good. Simply make the votes public.
That's
all. Every vote taken by the openSUSE Board -- on *every* issue --
should be made public. That way, when the next election occurs, the
openSUSE membership can make an informed decision on who to elect (or
re-elect) to best represent us.
But the absolute transparency you seem to advocate for, would not get
my vote - if such an idea is popular, I would suggest the Board as we
know it would be pointless - we might as well have anyone and everyone
making every decision in public.
That's ok. I respect your thoughts here. I believe you would be
out-voted by the membership by a rather wide margin.
Anyone else want the votes of Board members to be public?
Come on. So every board member can be attacked personally by you or the rest of the world? How the f*ck are we going to have board members if they can be social-media-killed after producing minutes. Dude, you're missing the point here completely.
Having a
simple vote on this would seem to me to be an easy way to settle this
(without the whole name-calling thing).
-Bryan Lunduke
This is really crossing my lines, Bryan. Sorry to say so, and I've kept quiet about some things so far, only because of my own principles of decency, But you are the one asking for transparancy:
You, and no one else, were the one that threatened the other Board members to go public in your youtube etc, channels, if they would not follow your opinion. Threatened with going public on your channels. Threatened, no other word. As a Board Member at the time, you twisted our arms behind our backs, ready for cufs. You, as a Board Member. That was the kind of democracy you showed me, and what the 'disappointment' phrasing was for. Don't worry about me, you can kill my reputation where ever you want, I don't care. Threaten me personally like that, please,
But, do not ever retry this on me again. I'm still feeling hurt by that coming from a self proclaimed free and open source person, where I thought free and open source wouldn't need such tactics, and certainly you personally wouldn't.
I'm getting some mixed signals here, my friend. :)
On a personal note: Bryan, please leave us alone. We'll do fine without your interference. The openSUSE Project is about openSUSE, not about Bryan Lunduke.
If you think this needs some discussion, feel free to email me, but, come to think if it, rather reply to this list first, but still feel free to contact me. --
Gertjan Lettink a.k.a. Knurpht
openSUSE Forums Team
Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 00:57:56 CEST schreef Bryan Lunduke:
Whoah. Yikes.
I'm simply suggesting transparency is good in this organization.
Of course, if it won't hurt anyone or anyone's reputation. Integrety etc,
You bring up an example -- while attacking me, personally -- where I wanted to be public about things and *some* people did not want to be public. And you didn't like that (apparently).''''
I was very clear about my position during that board meeting,
This is getting nasty and it really doesn't need to.
Agreed, I already offered to talk to you. Stepping in like this and judging the openSUSE Board like you did doesn't need to be like this either.
Let's just take a breath. I never attacked you. I never threatened you.
Don't deny, you did. You were very explicite on what you would do if ......
You threatened the Board, which I'm part off, to go public on an item if the other members would not reconsider a Board decision. I have no problems with further transparancy, but not without the involved persons agreeeing, and not being requested by someone 'blackmailing' ( read the quotes ) his fellow board members. You want full transparancy, here it is.
I'll just ignore the words you wrote below so we can move forward.
I still suggest a vote by the members to see if, going forward, it would be beneficial to have individual Board Member votes -- on any given topic -- be made public. If the membership of openSUSE doesn't want that... then that's settled. If we do want that... then that's easy to implement and shouldn't be a big deal.
-Bryan Lunduke
On 2018-08-25 15:31, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
For anybody reading this post:
I'm posting this as a private person, see my adjusted signature, and definitely not as an openSUSE Board Member. I've tried to post a neutral piece of content, but am aware that I'm emotianal about this, since Bryan was a Board member, though his activities were virtually zero.
Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 23:16:07 CEST schreef Bryan Lunduke:
On 2018-08-25 13:01, Richard Brown wrote:
Correct. That's how every election -- in every industry/government
across the globe -- works. If someone doesn't want to "come in
second"
they don't run for office.
Even popular people lose. Just how it works. That's life.
F*ck popular, that's your perception, not mine. Sorry if your's is such, being elected for what you do instead of popularity to me looks less stressful
But the Board is not 'running for office' in a sense that can be
considered analogous to any industry or government.
openSUSE Board Members are not empowered to create laws or sign orders
which others are duty bound to follow
Especially when you consider our primary role being one of dispute
resolution and judgement, we have more in common with Jurors than
company Board Members or Elected politicans
This is incorrect.
The openSUSE Board also makes budgetary decisions, endorsement decisions
(and policies / plans), coordination with other organizations (and
individuals), event planning, and even decisions of who will (or won't)
be allowed to be members of openSUSE (or utilize openSUSE resources).
The "jury" comparison you make is absolutely accurate... for a very
small portion of what the openSUSE Board does.
I'm getting some mixed signals here, my friend. :)
Just a few days ago you chastised others for being public about Board
decisions:
"Replying a little seriously, and to justify my vote publicly (which
is
something I shouldn't have to do, given the Board's rule that
decisions made collectively are defended collectively, but someone
seems to have forgotten that... :-/ )" - Richard Brown, Tuesday
And you are either acting intentionally obtuse or don't notice the
huge monumental difference between a situation where Board members are
required to stand up publicly as individuals and justify their
decision in public, and a situation where the Board collectively owns
both the decision "we as a group feel X" and the dissent "but a number
in our group also felt Y"
I'll just move past the out-of-left-field personal attacks...
The Board have been elected to a position where they are the final
arbiters of any decision that gets to their desk.
If an issue gets to their desk it can be argued that it only does so
because no other contributor was willing or able to make the decisions
via our usual (very public) means.
Somewhat correct.
This sort of process is not entirely unlike many forms of government
(such as in the USA) where the higher levels handle the items that the
lower levels either haven't, or chose not to tackle themselves
(City/County/State/Federal).
That said, the openSUSE Board also tackles items that do not first come
in front of the broader openSUSE membership. Sometimes yes. Sometimes
no. Either way, this is fine (as the Board is elected to handle such
things)... but it is entirely not like Juries in any real way.
I think it is therefore highly important that those decisions which
are trusted to the Board, are conducted in a way that empowers each
Board member to act on their conscious, without fear of public
reprisals after the fact.
I get it. Your position is that a person in an elected position should
be able to carry out their duties in secret -- and people who voted for
them have no right to know how they vote or what their options are.
That's weird to me. I see your point, I simply disagree with it on a
very core level.
If the Project wishes to fundamentally change the role and purpose of
the Board then I'd be willing to see that go to a Membership vote.
Yes. I think this would be good. Simply make the votes public.
That's
all. Every vote taken by the openSUSE Board -- on *every* issue --
should be made public. That way, when the next election occurs, the
openSUSE membership can make an informed decision on who to elect (or
re-elect) to best represent us.
But the absolute transparency you seem to advocate for, would not get
my vote - if such an idea is popular, I would suggest the Board as we
know it would be pointless - we might as well have anyone and everyone
making every decision in public.
That's ok. I respect your thoughts here. I believe you would be
out-voted by the membership by a rather wide margin.
Anyone else want the votes of Board members to be public?
Come on. So every board member can be attacked personally by you or the rest of the world? How the f*ck are we going to have board members if they can be social-media-killed after producing minutes. Dude, you're missing the point here completely.
Having a
simple vote on this would seem to me to be an easy way to settle this
(without the whole name-calling thing).
-Bryan Lunduke
This is really crossing my lines, Bryan. Sorry to say so, and I've kept quiet about some things so far, only because of my own principles of decency, But you are the one asking for transparancy:
You, and no one else, were the one that threatened the other Board members to go public in your youtube etc, channels, if they would not follow your opinion. Threatened with going public on your channels. Threatened, no other word. As a Board Member at the time, you twisted our arms behind our backs, ready for cufs. You, as a Board Member. That was the kind of democracy you showed me, and what the 'disappointment' phrasing was for. Don't worry about me, you can kill my reputation where ever you want, I don't care. Threaten me personally like that, please,
But, do not ever retry this on me again. I'm still feeling hurt by that coming from a self proclaimed free and open source person, where I thought free and open source wouldn't need such tactics, and certainly you personally wouldn't.
I'm getting some mixed signals here, my friend. :)
On a personal note: Bryan, please leave us alone. We'll do fine without your interference. The openSUSE Project is about openSUSE, not about Bryan Lunduke.
If you think this needs some discussion, feel free to email me, but, come to think if it, rather reply to this list first, but still feel free to contact me. --
Gertjan Lettink a.k.a. Knurpht
openSUSE Forums Tea
I think this thread has gone its full length and should end, now.
My feelings about the transparency are not for malicious reasons, and there was no idea where this was leading, was not aware of peoples' individual roles in this.
Not interested in flame wars.
No personal opinion on the Originally Mentioned team sponsorship, if the Board has chosen that, okay by me.
... but the transparency, or the differing degrees of it and where it is best limited, are something I will be willing to discuss in a better way sometime along in the future.
Certainly not in this derailed thread.
Hi,
You, and no one else, were the one that threatened the other Board members to go public in your youtube etc, channels, if they would not follow your opinion. Threatened with going public on your channels. Threatened, no other word. As a Board Member at the time, you twisted our arms behind our backs, ready for cufs. You, as a Board Member. That was the kind of democracy you showed me, and what the 'disappointment' phrasing was for. Don't worry about me, you can kill my reputation where ever you want, I don't care. Threaten me personally like that, please,
Out of curiosity, does board have a way to vote to have a member removed in such scenarios? If not, I feel it's community's responsibility to allow, in cases like these, to remove board member and allow for a new voting for empty seat (or get the 3rd/4th person out of latest voting in that place). LCP [Stasiek] https://lcp.world
On 26/08/2018 14:29, hellcp@opensuse.org wrote:
Hi,
You, and no one else, were the one that threatened the other Board members to go public in your youtube etc, channels, if they would not follow your opinion. Threatened with going public on your channels. Threatened, no other word. As a Board Member at the time, you twisted our arms behind our backs, ready for cufs. You, as a Board Member. That was the kind of democracy you showed me, and what the 'disappointment' phrasing was for. Don't worry about me, you can kill my reputation where ever you want, I don't care. Threaten me personally like that, please,
Out of curiosity, does board have a way to vote to have a member removed in such scenarios? If not, I feel it's community's responsibility to allow, in cases like these, to remove board member and allow for a new voting for empty seat (or get the 3rd/4th person out of latest voting in that place). LCP [Stasiek] https://lcp.world
Here are the 3 paragraphs of interest from https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_rules
In the event of repeated absence without contact, or other serious misconduct or negligence, a Board member may be subject to removal. Before any other process occurs, the Board member in question will be personally contacted by the chairperson to try to resolve the situation. If this contact does not successfully resolve the situation, the Board member in question may be removed by a vote of 2/3s of the other board members. The board should appoint a new board member or call elections to fill the vacancy.
The sitting board is allowed to appoint new members to fill a board vacancy caused by one of the following conditions: 1) resignation of a Board member or 2) the removal of a Board member, or 3) a Board member being unable to perform his duties, or 4) as part of elections if not enough people are elected.
Instead of opting to appoint more than one board member, the board may opt to call for new board elections for the vacant seats. These board members will then be elected for the current election period and the next period ? thus until 31st of December of the next year.
On 26/08/2018 06:46, Bryan Lunduke wrote:
This is incorrect.
The openSUSE Board also makes budgetary decisions, endorsement decisions (and policies / plans), coordination with other organizations (and individuals), event planning, and even decisions of who will (or won't) be allowed to be members of openSUSE (or utilize openSUSE resources).
I'll only reply to this part because its slightly incorrect. The board has no say in who becomes an openSUSE member, this is done by a separate membership committee as to avoid a conflict of interest. Yes the board can in certain situations remove members but if the community doesn't think we handle this correctly they can also choose to remove us or not vote for us the next time.
Here are the 3 paragraphs of interest from https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_rules
In the event of repeated absence without contact, or other serious misconduct or negligence, a Board member may be subject to removal. Before any other process occurs, the Board member in question will be personally contacted by the chairperson to try to resolve the situation. If this contact does not successfully resolve the situation, the Board member in question may be removed by a vote of 2/3s of the other board members. The board should appoint a new board member or call elections to fill the vacancy.
The sitting board is allowed to appoint new members to fill a board vacancy caused by one of the following conditions: 1) resignation of a Board member or 2) the removal of a Board member, or 3) a Board member being unable to perform his duties, or 4) as part of elections if not enough people are elected.
Instead of opting to appoint more than one board member, the board may opt to call for new board elections for the vacant seats. These board members will then be elected for the current election period and the next period ? thus until 31st of December of the next year.
Alright then, Knurpht, has this been brought up to Richard? It might be a little late, but I would like to know (as a member), if the board worked correctly before the last election. Also would be nice to hear if anybody else from previous two boards feels the same about the situation.
This might setup an important precident for when things aren't democratic anymore, and turn into dictatorship of some sort. It might also backfire in some other ways, but we already fucked up by even having this conversation at all, so we might as well go a little bit deeper.
LCP [Stasiek] https://lcp.world
On 26/08/18 15:25, hellcp@opensuse.org wrote:
Here are the 3 paragraphs of interest from https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_rules
In the event of repeated absence without contact, or other serious misconduct or negligence, a Board member may be subject to removal. Before any other process occurs, the Board member in question will be personally contacted by the chairperson to try to resolve the situation. If this contact does not successfully resolve the situation, the Board member in question may be removed by a vote of 2/3s of the other board members. The board should appoint a new board member or call elections to fill the vacancy.
The sitting board is allowed to appoint new members to fill a board vacancy caused by one of the following conditions: 1) resignation of a Board member or 2) the removal of a Board member, or 3) a Board member being unable to perform his duties, or 4) as part of elections if not enough people are elected.
Instead of opting to appoint more than one board member, the board may opt to call for new board elections for the vacant seats. These board members will then be elected for the current election period and the next period ? thus until 31st of December of the next year.
Alright then, Knurpht, has this been brought up to Richard? It might be a little late, but I would like to know (as a member), if the board worked correctly before the last election. Also would be nice to hear if anybody else from previous two boards feels the same about the situation.
This might setup an important precident for when things aren't democratic anymore, and turn into dictatorship of some sort. It might also backfire in some other ways, but we already fucked up by even having this conversation at all, so we might as well go a little bit deeper.
LCP [Stasiek] https://lcp.world
As part of this discussion and the matters you raised, you may be interested in this decision made by the Board at its meeting 18-20 March 2016:
<quote>
Mailinglist Moderation
Board discussed concerns regarding some behaviour of a few individuals on the mailinglists.
We recognise that some misbehaviour requires fast action. Agreed that any one Board member can act on behalf of the Board.
When behaviour is not inline with the Guiding Principles the Board agreed a principle of 1 private warning followed by a Ban
</quote>
https://rootco.de/2016-03-20-board-meeting-f2f-2016-p2/
BC
On 08/25/2018 08:09 PM, Per Jessen wrote:
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 21:44:14 CEST schreef Bryan Lunduke:
On 2018-08-24 08:32, Ana Martínez wrote:
= Sponsorships =
== Football team discussion in the last minutes thread ==
We discussed if was appropriated to explain personal points of views on the topic.
It is not only appropriate that those personal points of view are expressed... it is *critical*.
The Board positions are elected (other than Richard, who is installed by a corporation). If Board members cannot speak their personal opinions on any (and every) topic, it becomes *pointless* to have elections -- as there would be no way to easily understand the differences between elected officials and hold them accountable to the people who elected them.
Are there any other items Board members are currently forbidden / discouraged from discussing?
-Bryan Lunduke
I completely disagree here, Bryan, and I consider your post as trolling. You know very well how it works and has worked. We did not discuss whether or not we have personal opinions, we discussed ventilating disagreement with decisions democraticly taken.
I have to agree with Bryan. A board does not operate as a team. The individual members are appointed or elected because of their individual charm/ability/following/haircolour/experience/outlook/whatever. It is very important that the elected members remain true to that. It is the main thing they bring to the party. If a board member disagrees with a democratic decision, it is perfectly fine to point that out. Isn't it quite simply this - when I disagree with a decision made by the board, I would like to know that the board member I elected also disagreed?
Me too. I would like to know what each board member votes, so that next time we have to elect the board I can make an informed choice. This is simple democratic standards. I can know what each member of parliament said on camera or what each one voted, except when the vote was decided to be secret.
Would you accept team members that question any decision that was voted on?
Certainly. I would. Professionally, I am a board member in other places. We don't operate as a team, we are there to govern a company based on our personal experiences, opinions and outlook. When a board operates as a team, you only have to look at Raiffeisen Schweiz to see how bad it can go. Or even my local football club.
On Sunday, 26 August 2018 19:20:47 ACST, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 08/25/2018 08:09 PM, Per Jessen wrote:
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote: ...
Me too. I would like to know what each board member votes, so that next time we have to elect the board I can make an informed choice. This is simple democratic standards. I can know what each member of parliament said on camera or what each one voted, except when the vote was decided to be secret.
Currently the board decides via mutual agreement what level of detail we will post about each topic in our minutes which ranges from sometimes including a detailed description to other times not even mentioning we discussed the topic in the minutes, when deciding on this the board has to evaluate whats in the best interest of the project and the parties involved.
Personally I am almost always happy to justify my actions / choices but I won't do it in such a way that undermines publicly what the board has chosen to make public vs keeping in confidence.
I am happy to bring up the topic of whether we should list who voted for and against in the minutes by default unless someone requests otherwise but I can understand how people may feel more free to vote for the best option for the project rather then to protect themselves if the vote is private, you also have to remember that in many cases when we vote we have all the information at hand to make the best decision and for a multitude of reasons we may not decide to make all that information public, it then becomes very hard to justify my vote one way or another if its made based on information we don't want to or can't make public. For that reason I believe there will always be cases where who voted for what should remain private. Having said that for 90% of things so far decisions have been reached unanimously without needing to vote.
On Sun, 26 Aug 2018 at 11:51, Carlos E. R. robin.listas@telefonica.net wrote:
I completely disagree here, Bryan, and I consider your post as trolling. You know very well how it works and has worked. We did not discuss whether or not we have personal opinions, we discussed ventilating disagreement with decisions democraticly taken.
I have to agree with Bryan. A board does not operate as a team. The individual members are appointed or elected because of their individual charm/ability/following/haircolour/experience/outlook/whatever. It is very important that the elected members remain true to that. It is the main thing they bring to the party. If a board member disagrees with a democratic decision, it is perfectly fine to point that out. Isn't it quite simply this - when I disagree with a decision made by the board, I would like to know that the board member I elected also disagreed?
Me too. I would like to know what each board member votes, so that next time we have to elect the board I can make an informed choice. This is simple democratic standards. I can know what each member of parliament said on camera or what each one voted, except when the vote was decided to be secret.
Would this same principle of openness apply to the membership votes? Both the election of Board members and any other special voting (such as those for constitutional change)?
I imagine such a suggestion to be apocalyptic to community harmony, with Board members ignoring those who voted against them and favouring those who voted for them, with groups of members bickering amongst each other for voting contrary to their opinions.
Many countries, even with very open democracies, have secret ballots for this very reason, to ensure that the electorate can vote based on their internal, personal views, without worrying about public reprisals for their decisions.
Given the nature of many of the issues the Board has to vote upon, the ability for each Board member to vote based on their concious, knowing that the Board collectively will own the groups decision, is a freedom which I would miss if it were removed.
To give a highly illustrative example with names removed to preserve the innocent.
There is at least one person active on our mailinglists who has been the subject of a number of petitions to the Board for their removal from the Project, due to what I would describe as their persistent 'misalignment' with the rest of the Project. The Board has repeatedly evaluated that the person involved has not acted in a way that can be considered a breach of our guiding principles, but there is also no question that the person in question is a source of constant frustration for a significant proportion of the Project
All of these petitions to the Board regarding this individual have been shot down on the grounds of being 'wrong' in the eyes of the Board to consider the removal of the person in question. (See all the other recent statements regarding everyone's acceptance of a healthy amount of dissent for more background) Any time this topic has been minuted, it has been done so with all details anonymised - giving a full public account of those votes would undermine the outcome of the vote protecting the member in question.
Considering this example in a situation where Board votes were public, there would are two major differences I can forsee
1) The Board would be compelled to minute all of the details of who was involved in the petition to the Board, including the initiators of the complaints and the subjects - There is no way this is a good thing. People having a problem with others in the Project should feel they can reach out to the Board in confidence, and people accused of being disruptive to the Project deserve privacy. Even if the Board kept its current role as abitrators of disputes, such a model of disclosure would risk every dispute descending into a public trial of the individuals involved. 2) Individuals in the Board would likely be swayed by considering what was popular, not what was right. In this example, I think it's safe to argue that it would be a highly popular move to vote in agreement with the petition to remove the disruptive member, even though it would be an ethically incorrect one.
I wouldn't want to be part of the Project that operated like that, but that is the pandoras box we risk opening if we go down this road.
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 20:09:20 CEST schreef Per Jessen:
If a board member disagrees with a democratic decision, it is perfectly fine to point that out.
That is not the issue. If the board, as a democratic entity, votes, the result is that of the board, not of individuals. Whenever a member disagrees and wants to post about it, it's nothing more than decent to state that a personal statement is made. That's one of the consequenses of being a board member, having two hats.
Isn't it quite simply this - when I disagree with a decision made by the board, I would like to know that the board member I elected also disagreed?
Of course, but that should be a statement from Per Jessen, community member, not Per Jessen, Board member.
Uh no. They are the same. Only if Per Jessen speaks on behalf of the board would I have to consider the board's opinion or decision. As a board member, I should hope my opinion in board meetings would be the same as expressed publicly.
Would you accept team members that question any decision that was voted on?
Certainly. I would. Professionally, I am a board member in other places. We don't operate as a team, we are there to govern a company based on our personal experiences, opinions and outlook. When a board operates as a team, you only have to look at Raiffeisen Schweiz to see how bad it can go. Or even my local football club.
A company != a community. And I don't care about examples of things going wrong. If you think we're on the wrong track, gather the crowd and bring down the board as an ultimate measure.
Please Gertjan, why not be open for discussion, what is it with the trumpish stance? As an elected or appointed member for a company or a sports club or openSUSE, your obligations are more or less the same. You are there to help govern the <entity> according to your beliefs, opinions and insights.
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
For anybody reading this post:
I'm posting this as a private person, see my adjusted signature, and definitely not as an openSUSE Board Member.
I realise I am a little late to this discussion, but I should like to know why your opinions/behaviour differ depending on whether you are Gertjan <private individual> or if you are Gertjan <openSUSE board member>?
F*ck popular, that's your perception, not mine.
See, when you as Gertjan <private individual> believe such language is appropriate, I find it very difficult to accept that Gertjan, <openSUSE board member> should think differently. Emotional state taken into account.
I mean, do we now expect you to admonish yourself for using poor language on an openSUSE mailing list?
If I had voted for you as a board member, I should very much expect you not change your language just because you got elected.
Simon Lees wrote:
On 26/08/2018 06:46, Bryan Lunduke wrote:
This is incorrect.
The openSUSE Board also makes budgetary decisions, endorsement decisions (and policies / plans), coordination with other organizations (and individuals), event planning, and even decisions of who will (or won't) be allowed to be members of openSUSE (or utilize openSUSE resources).
I'll only reply to this part because its slightly incorrect. The board has no say in who becomes an openSUSE member, this is done by a separate membership committee as to avoid a conflict of interest. Yes the board can in certain situations remove members but if the community doesn't think we handle this correctly they can also choose to remove us or not vote for us the next time.
Maybe there are a couple of issues here that the Board ought to address.
We don't vote for "us", we vote for "you", so a) how can we know if a board member handles <a situation correctly> if the vote/opinion of the individual is not public?
b) why is it that the Board can dismiss a member but not admit one? I.e. do we not need to avoid conflicts of interest when dismissing a member?
Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 19:01:00 CEST schreef Per Jessen:
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
For anybody reading this post:
I'm posting this as a private person, see my adjusted signature, and definitely not as an openSUSE Board Member.
I realise I am a little late to this discussion, but I should like to know why your opinions/behaviour differ depending on whether you are Gertjan <private individual> or if you are Gertjan <openSUSE board member>?
F*ck popular, that's your perception, not mine.
See, when you as Gertjan <private individual> believe such language is appropriate, I find it very difficult to accept that Gertjan, <openSUSE board member> should think differently. Emotional state taken into account.
You're right about that. I apologize
I mean, do we now expect you to admonish yourself for using poor language on an openSUSE mailing list?
If I had voted for you as a board member, I should very much expect you not change your language just because you got elected.
Like said, your right.
Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 18:49:25 CEST schreef Per Jessen:
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 20:09:20 CEST schreef Per Jessen:
If a board member disagrees with a democratic decision, it is perfectly fine to point that out.
That is not the issue. If the board, as a democratic entity, votes, the result is that of the board, not of individuals. Whenever a member disagrees and wants to post about it, it's nothing more than decent to state that a personal statement is made. That's one of the consequenses of being a board member, having two hats.
Isn't it quite simply this - when I disagree with a decision made by the board, I would like to know that the board member I elected also disagreed?
Of course, but that should be a statement from Per Jessen, community member, not Per Jessen, Board member.
Uh no. They are the same. Only if Per Jessen speaks on behalf of the board would I have to consider the board's opinion or decision. As a board member, I should hope my opinion in board meetings would be the same as expressed publicly.
Would you accept team members that question any decision that was voted on?
Certainly. I would. Professionally, I am a board member in other places. We don't operate as a team, we are there to govern a company based on our personal experiences, opinions and outlook. When a board operates as a team, you only have to look at Raiffeisen Schweiz to see how bad it can go. Or even my local football club.
A company != a community. And I don't care about examples of things going wrong. If you think we're on the wrong track, gather the crowd and bring down the board as an ultimate measure.
Please Gertjan, why not be open for discussion, what is it with the trumpish stance? As an elected or appointed member for a company or a sports club or openSUSE, your obligations are more or less the same. You are there to help govern the <entity> according to your beliefs, opinions and insights.
I am open for discussion, Per. But I don't believe in total transparency where names are involved f.e. or details of conflicts are revealed.
* Knurpht-openSUSE knurpht@opensuse.org [08-26-18 16:57]: [...]
I am open for discussion, Per. But I don't believe in total transparency where names are involved f.e. or details of conflicts are revealed.
it is about where you or the individual stands on the issues, not about "conflicts" which should not happen. differences of opinion are expected and needed to resolve issues, that they be understood.
I would definitely want to know how one voted as I may have an opinion about particular issue and want to vote for someone who follows what I expect. how else can one determine who they want to represent them?
it appears embarassment and or blame are being considered and they should never enter into the process.
On 27/08/2018 02:47, Per Jessen wrote:
Simon Lees wrote:
On 26/08/2018 06:46, Bryan Lunduke wrote:
This is incorrect.
The openSUSE Board also makes budgetary decisions, endorsement decisions (and policies / plans), coordination with other organizations (and individuals), event planning, and even decisions of who will (or won't) be allowed to be members of openSUSE (or utilize openSUSE resources).
I'll only reply to this part because its slightly incorrect. The board has no say in who becomes an openSUSE member, this is done by a separate membership committee as to avoid a conflict of interest. Yes the board can in certain situations remove members but if the community doesn't think we handle this correctly they can also choose to remove us or not vote for us the next time.
Maybe there are a couple of issues here that the Board ought to address.
We don't vote for "us", we vote for "you", so a) how can we know if a board member handles <a situation correctly> if the vote/opinion of the individual is not public?
How do you know I handled a situation correctly if the board has chosen not to make any details of that situation public? Or if the only information we make public is that the board helped resolve a conflict between two people?
The truth is you will never be able to see everything we do so you'll just have to judge us on the bits you see. Next time I run for election I'm more then happy to answer questions like "The board voted / decided on <insert issue here> what was your opinion and i'll answer the best I can but i'm not going to do this publicly after every vote on every issue, when I vote for something in a board meeting i get a chance to justify why I am voting a certain way simply putting my name down in the minutes as voting for or against X does not allow me to justify my reasoning. As I have said elsewhere if you ask me in private for my thoughts depending on how much I trust you I'll likely give you some form of reasoning. Even if it is I can't justify my decision without sharing private info that I can't or am not willing to share. If you ask about every single issue though i'll probably start to push you down my priority list though.
b) why is it that the Board can dismiss a member but not admit one? I.e. do we not need to avoid conflicts of interest when dismissing a member?
There is only limited cases where we can remove a member all of which involve unacceptable behavior on the members part and prior formal warnings. If the board could approve memberships we could theoretically come up with a conspiracy to give membership to a bunch of people who aren't active in the community but are willing to vote for us and prevent new people being elected.
On the other hand if a member of the community is not behaving someone needs to have the ability to remove them which is one of the main roles given to the board when it was first created.
On 27/08/18 07:39, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
- Knurpht-openSUSE knurpht@opensuse.org [08-26-18 16:57]: [...]
I am open for discussion, Per. But I don't believe in total transparency where names are involved f.e. or details of conflicts are revealed.
it is about where you or the individual stands on the issues, not about "conflicts" which should not happen. differences of opinion are expected and needed to resolve issues, that they be understood.
I would definitely want to know how one voted as I may have an opinion about particular issue and want to vote for someone who follows what I expect. how else can one determine who they want to represent them?
I agree with what you say.
I also would like to add a thought which only now just occurred to me -- you'll see why I say this in a minute.
Over the years I have been on many committees, more like 'boards' if you like, and on one I was the Secretary with one my responsibilities, of course, was to produce the detailed Minutes of the 'board's' ordinary and extraordinary meetings.
The Minutes naturally contained the usual words of "Motion passed unanimously" or "Passed by majority votes" or similar wording. After the Minutes were written-up they were circulated as a draft to all 'board' members for correction/addition/approval before I produced the final version to be adopted as the official record of the meeting at the next meeting of the 'board'.
The thought which only just now occurred to me is: while the Minutes may have stated that some Motion was approved by a majority of 'board' members there was never a list of who voted for or against the Motion. It just never occurred to anyone to have such a list included in the Minutes.
Alright, when you think about it doing so would become a tedious task -- but there is a very simple solution to this. The draft Minutes are circulated to each Member for correction/etc before being finalised so during this editing stage the member(s) who voted AGAINST a motion adds his/her name(s) stating "Voted Against: Joe Doe, Mary Contrary,...". Since the members present at that meeting are always listed at the beginning of the Minutes it becomes clear by elimination who voted FOR the motion.
This would produce the transparency which you, Patrick, and, I will add, also other Community members, is requesting in what you wrote above.
it appears embarassment and or blame are being considered and they should never enter into the process.
This should be considered as self-evident.
BC
Simon Lees wrote:
On 27/08/2018 02:47, Per Jessen wrote:
Maybe there are a couple of issues here that the Board ought to address.
We don't vote for "us", we vote for "you", so a) how can we know if a board member handles <a situation correctly> if the vote/opinion of the individual is not public?
How do you know I handled a situation correctly if the board has chosen not to make any details of that situation public? Or if the only information we make public is that the board helped resolve a conflict between two people?
In that situation, obviously I can't.
The truth is you will never be able to see everything we do so you'll just have to judge us on the bits you see.
I wasn't suggesting or asking that _every_ vote should be made public, just that it should be perfectly acceptable to do so. As in this case.
[snip]
when I vote for something in a board meeting i get a chance to justify why I am voting a certain way simply putting my name down in the minutes as voting for or against X does not allow me to justify my reasoning.
There isn't really any need to justify your vote to the community, but the community might still like to know how you represent their interests.
Hey,
On 26.08.2018 15:26, Richard Brown wrote:
- The Board would be compelled to minute all of the details of who
was involved in the petition to the Board...
- Individuals in the Board would likely be swayed by considering what
was popular, not what was right....
You are making this sound as if it's an either/or decision. When in reality it is either/or & all shades in between. You can decide to make a public vote on sponsoring a football team AND make a private vote on final conflict resolution. It's up to your discretion basically.
Members then can not only decide on if they like your haircut and think you do the right thing for the project but _ALSO_ on your public votes, the public/private vote ratio of you as a group, the handling of what you as a group deem public/private etc. etc.
Henne
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On Sat, 2018-08-25 at 22:01 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
The Project elected a Board to do a specific job. We're not Board members as part of some political or business exercise, but to serve the Project in a very specific way, doing an often ugly job so no one else has to.
This has an analogue in juries around the world, an equally thankless task, but important one. One where the words and statements of jurors made during their deliberations cannot be made public.
The outcome of that deliberation, the decision of guilt or innocence, and the number of jurors for and against a decision are shared as an output of those deliberations, but the deliberations themselves are sacrosanct and forbidden from being aired in any court in order to ensure that those decisions can be made without any fear of external influence.
The Board have been elected to a position where they are the final arbiters of any decision that gets to their desk. If an issue gets to their desk it can be argued that it only does so because no other contributor was willing or able to make the decisions via our usual (very public) means. We are after all, decision makers and arbiters of last resort - the community should be taking care of any issue that it can long before it ever ends up needing a Board decision.
I think it is therefore highly important that those decisions which are trusted to the Board, are conducted in a way that empowers each Board member to act on their conscious, without fear of public reprisals after the fact.
The 'jury' analogy only goes so far, as a jury is an imposed responsibility, whereas joining the Board is a public action of choice - - exactly akin to running for office.
There's a reasonable expectation that a representative will share their decisions with their constituency, otherwise there is no check on the validity of their representation. That's a relatively clear and obvious core tenet of representational governing, and yes I'd like to see the Board move that direction.
On the other hand, I do recognize the jurist component, but again, you cannot separate the self-selected public nature of running for the Board, so the only fair comparison is something like the US. Supreme Court, where not only do we know the votes, and an opinion by the group in support of the decision, but any number of dissenting opinions, by those who disagree with the majority. This makes the issue completely transparent, and has the bonus of allowing future Board members the opportunity to understand the decision, and possibly correct for new conditions in the future, without "guessing" at prior intent.
While I understand the decisions of our governing Board may be not quite as dramatic as all that would suggest, I think it's fair and reasonable for the membership to ask for, and if necessary vote to impose, some more transparency from the board; e.g.
1) Knowing what issues the Board has voted on, and who voted how. 2) Having an opinion from the majority about the decision (this we have now) 3) Expecting dissenters to the majority opinion to express the nature of their dissent within the bounds of the issue and majority opinion.
- -- James Mason jmason@suse.com SUSE
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On Sun, 2018-08-26 at 15:26 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
Would this same principle of openness apply to the membership votes? Both the election of Board members and any other special voting (such as those for constitutional change)?
I imagine such a suggestion to be apocalyptic to community harmony, with Board members ignoring those who voted against them and favouring those who voted for them, with groups of members bickering amongst each other for voting contrary to their opinions.
Many countries, even with very open democracies, have secret ballots for this very reason, to ensure that the electorate can vote based on their internal, personal views, without worrying about public reprisals for their decisions.
Again, jike the jury analogy, you're conflating the responsibility put on an entire democratic community with the expectations placed on people who self-select to be the public decision makers.
Those who have responsibility thrust upon them should have a reasonable expectation of anonymity for their decision. Those who choose to run for office, who _self-select to be more public about their decisions_ have an obigation to share them.
If one doesn't want to make their opinions public, for whatever reason, they should not run for office.
- -- James Mason jmason@suse.com SUSE
* James Mason JMason@suse.com [08-27-18 11:44]:
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On Sat, 2018-08-25 at 22:01 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
The Project elected a Board to do a specific job. We're not Board members as part of some political or business exercise, but to serve the Project in a very specific way, doing an often ugly job so no one else has to.
This has an analogue in juries around the world, an equally thankless task, but important one. One where the words and statements of jurors made during their deliberations cannot be made public.
The outcome of that deliberation, the decision of guilt or innocence, and the number of jurors for and against a decision are shared as an output of those deliberations, but the deliberations themselves are sacrosanct and forbidden from being aired in any court in order to ensure that those decisions can be made without any fear of external influence.
The Board have been elected to a position where they are the final arbiters of any decision that gets to their desk. If an issue gets to their desk it can be argued that it only does so because no other contributor was willing or able to make the decisions via our usual (very public) means. We are after all, decision makers and arbiters of last resort - the community should be taking care of any issue that it can long before it ever ends up needing a Board decision.
I think it is therefore highly important that those decisions which are trusted to the Board, are conducted in a way that empowers each Board member to act on their conscious, without fear of public reprisals after the fact.
The 'jury' analogy only goes so far, as a jury is an imposed responsibility, whereas joining the Board is a public action of choice
- exactly akin to running for office.
There's a reasonable expectation that a representative will share their decisions with their constituency, otherwise there is no check on the validity of their representation. That's a relatively clear and obvious core tenet of representational governing, and yes I'd like to see the Board move that direction.
On the other hand, I do recognize the jurist component, but again, you cannot separate the self-selected public nature of running for the Board, so the only fair comparison is something like the US. Supreme Court, where not only do we know the votes, and an opinion by the group in support of the decision, but any number of dissenting opinions, by those who disagree with the majority. This makes the issue completely transparent, and has the bonus of allowing future Board members the opportunity to understand the decision, and possibly correct for new conditions in the future, without "guessing" at prior intent.
While I understand the decisions of our governing Board may be not quite as dramatic as all that would suggest, I think it's fair and reasonable for the membership to ask for, and if necessary vote to impose, some more transparency from the board; e.g.
- Knowing what issues the Board has voted on, and who voted how.
- Having an opinion from the majority about the decision (this we have
now) 3) Expecting dissenters to the majority opinion to express the nature of their dissent within the bounds of the issue and majority opinion.
sell said, and I also support your ensuing msg. I elect represenative(s) with an expectation of them following the path I determine from their bio and presentations prior to election. I *really* want to know that they are doing as I expect and the *only* way is to see their votes and arguments.
On Mon, 27 Aug 2018 at 17:48, James Mason JMason@suse.com wrote:
If one doesn't want to make their opinions public, for whatever reason, they should not run for office.
Fair points, but, unlike the Supreme court, Board membership is not for life.
Let me give a real world example, as much as I can.
There is a person active on these mailinglists who in 2016 was banned from these lists
I asked whether or not I could use their example publicly to help explain this situation and they have not responded. Therefore I will assume they wish to retain their privacy and do my best to anonymise their circumstances.
But I still need to use their example illustratively.
Board voted on the behaviour individual in question. The Board deemed the behaviour inconsistent with the Project's Guiding Principles and decision was to give the individual a warning.
The individual continued to act a similar way. The Board voted again. The decision was made to ban the user from the lists.
After a while, the question as to whether or not unban the person, the board voted again, the decision was made to unban the user.
The Board changed it's composition in the meanwhile. A number of people involved in the banning had no opportunity to be involved in the unbanning.
Now, in 2018, the majority of the people involved are no longer on the Board, and are regular peers in the Project.
Had all of the votes been public, the individual in question would have a direct list of who on the Board voted for their removal from these lists, and who did or didn't support their return.
There is no way you could convince me that such a situation would be healthy for the Project. Grudges and bad feelings between the Board members and the individual would be unavoidable. Friends and allies of the banned individual could still be feeling hurt by the decisions of the Board members involved, or and could easily be carrying grudges against those individuals.
Tensions over such topics would likely run for years long before the decision. But such decisions are still necessary from time to time.
Unless saintly in character, it's almost certain the banned individual would have a harder time rehabilitating themselves in the Project.
The anonymity of who in the Board voted for what has created a situation where the Board was able to pass it's decision, a decision which is NEVER comfortable, NEVER wanted, but sometimes necessary.
They banned contributor remains surrounded by people who passed judgement on their suitability to remain in the Project. The fact that details of who voted for whom are not public prevents the sanctioned contributor to take the situation personally, and allows the Board members to carry on as regular contributors now they have left the Board.
The banned individual has been successful in rehabilitating themselves, and the Board members have returned to non-Board life, in a way that I am certain would not have been possible if they were aware of the details of who voted for what when.
* Richard Brown RBrownCCB@opensuse.org [08-27-18 12:36]:
On Mon, 27 Aug 2018 at 17:48, James Mason JMason@suse.com wrote:
If one doesn't want to make their opinions public, for whatever reason, they should not run for office.
Fair points, but, unlike the Supreme court, Board membership is not for life.
Let me give a real world example, as much as I can.
There is a person active on these mailinglists who in 2016 was banned from these lists
[...]
transparency does not require airing dirty linen. some discretion is still required and should be supported. the *rest* should be public record.
On Mon, 27 Aug 2018 at 18:42, Patrick Shanahan paka@opensuse.org wrote:
- Richard Brown RBrownCCB@opensuse.org [08-27-18 12:36]:
On Mon, 27 Aug 2018 at 17:48, James Mason JMason@suse.com wrote:
If one doesn't want to make their opinions public, for whatever reason, they should not run for office.
Fair points, but, unlike the Supreme court, Board membership is not for life.
Let me give a real world example, as much as I can.
There is a person active on these mailinglists who in 2016 was banned from these lists
[...]
transparency does not require airing dirty linen. some discretion is still required and should be supported. the *rest* should be public record.
Then the question becomes - if some discretion isn't required, then why are the Board being involved?
I'd personally like to see a situation where if the Project can make the decisions publicly, then it should do so, and the Board is only involved where that is not true and discretion is required.
After all, that mentality is consistent with the Boards role of being decision makers _of_last_resort_
If other people can make decisions outside of the context of the Board, they should feel empowered to do so.
The Board should be left just dealing with the metaphorical shit left over.
Which is the job they've been trusted by vote to do.
Voting for a Board to do other stuff for the Project seems rather backwards to me - we're a Project that empowers its contributors to decide what they want. It's the fundamental ethos' of the Project. The Board is just there to handle the exceptions when that idealism falls apart.
Just look at the openSUSE Asia community for an example of that mentality made manifest. Deciding their own conferences, negotiating with their own sponsors, arranging their own venues, all done in a team of their own creation, a structure of their own creation, using policies of their own creation.
This is precisely how the openSUSE Project is meant to operate.
The only time the Board get involved with openSUSE Asia are those situations which require discretion, because those are the ones they're not able to deal with themselves..and I like to think we do a good job of helping them when those cases come up, but, due to the nature of them, you likely can't and won't ever see more detail in the minutes regarding such circumstances than you already do.
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On Mon, 2018-08-27 at 18:33 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
The banned individual has been successful in rehabilitating themselves, and the Board members have returned to non-Board life, in a way that I am certain would not have been possible if they were aware of the details of who voted for what when.
The fact that you can use it as an example now exactly supports my point. In your example, the rehabilitated member could just as easily look at who was on the board at the time and blame everyone equally - hiding the votes doesn't shield members of the board, it just creates opacity.
And I agree with Patrick & Henne here; no one is asking for every little detail - especially when it comes to respecting the rights of the Membership; I'm just asking for more clarity about decisions that are made, _why_ they are made, and what arguments were made in dissent of the decision.
While I, personally, have a level of faith in the Board to "Do The Right Thing", that does not supercede the need to witness that the Board actually _did_.
- -- James Mason jmason@suse.com SUSE
On 08/27/2018 11:02 AM, James Mason wrote:
The fact that you can use it as an example now exactly supports my point. In your example, the rehabilitated member could just as easily look at who was on the board at the time and blame everyone equally - hiding the votes doesn't shield members of the board, it just creates opacity.
"I do not think that [logic[ means what you think it means." - Me, when I rewrite "Princess Bride" and play the villain Vizzini myself.
Blaming everybody else is anybody's right for what goes wrong (banning from lists as an example), and humans do it pretty well as a rule. Since it (banning) happened, undoubtedly it needed to happen since most people I have met are more likely to be lenient, particularly in a community-run organization, than ban somebody. As a result, we can trust it was needed because most people on the Board voted for it, but then there were probably still arguments for both sides, maybe even dissenters in the final vote, but what value is there in airing all of this? The results of doing so are at least:
1. Internal pressure on board members to be less-controversial, i.e. NOT do what was necessary in enacting the ban; this is a natural reaction in order to avoid #2. 2. Create hard feelings with individuals on the board, rather than the Board as an entity or the project as an entity, which could lead to harassment before or after directly to those members. 3. Create hard feelings between the banned and those who originally requested the ban (not necessarily on the board). It seems like if all voting details are shared, then the original requests for removal should also be shared. 4. Make a return (for the banned) to the project harder. It is hard for people to lose face and then come back, even if the community is completely open, accepting, forgiving, etc. Since this return has happened, it seems like hard things have been accomplished, and the project is likely better for it. With personal grudges for board members, or others who complained about the poor behavior, would that have been accomplished? Maybe. 5. Time may be completely wasted documenting what people may never read, or may be less-inclined to read because of how long it is. Take this e-mail for example; nobody's going to read it once I'm done typingall of this.
Can you imagine the next time we have a pre-voting chat with potential board members after the ban in an everything-public world? The social media world should make it pretty clear what is likely, or at least more likely, in that case.
Possible question: "Candidate A: I understand you are opposed to people expressing their views when they are different from your own, and have even kicked people out of the mailing lists when you felt like it. Care to comment?"
The board members deserve a bit more respect than that, but so do most people attacked online or in person. Words are fun for use and abuse.
All of this typing of mine may be moot, since I think you and I may be more closely aligned than the first part of your response lead me to believe; see below.
And I agree with Patrick & Henne here; no one is asking for every little detail - especially when it comes to respecting the rights of the Membership; I'm just asking for more clarity about decisions that are made, _why_ they are made, and what arguments were made in dissent of the decision.
Striking a default documentation balance will be the hard part. Recording all conversations is Orwellian, and apparently the current minutes (on their own) may be insufficient for some. How much cost (not just monetary) do we justify for having more detail? How much time do we want people who are there to use their brains and make decisions to now be spent typing up notes on the off chance somebody cares? How much time do we want those same folks reviewing the recorded minutes to ensure everything is perfect before releasing to the mob?
I write "off chance" because this is the first time I remember seeing this topic come up, and maybe that is just because the notes were made more obvious this time, but that's pretty ironic if true: the presence of more information causing more problems by leading to arguments asking for more information?
Is it against any rules to ask follow-up questions which the Board (as a group) could respond-to as appropriate? Some have already expressed they would answer questions if asked, and if responding is appropriate. This would potentially let the minutes be succinct but not rule out membership requests for details, like "Which soccer/football team?" or "How much dud it cost?" or "What publicity does that bring in for the project?" Questions on "Who was banned?" or other things could be no-comment'd.
The pre-election chat where questions were asked of candidates was the right place to find out about candidates' fit for Board positions, and it included questions that seemed very Board-ly. I'm sure the chat is online somewhere if any of us were not there or have not read it already.
While I, personally, have a level of faith in the Board to "Do The Right Thing", that does not supercede the need to witness that the Board actually _did_.
I think you're confusing, or are being ambiguous about, the Board vs. board members. The Board already releases minutes, and since I think most of us can see the value in not releasing every detail ever covered all the time always, we then are left to trust the Board to self-regulate the minutes released. There is no way to monitor what they choose not to release, and there are compelling reasons to NOT have everything ever discussed. Let's find a middle ground (see above) that makes sense so the board can do their job, feel like they will not be harassed or attacked for doing it, and we can have more faith/trust in them than we do now (if possible).
Not related to your latest post, while the Supreme Court analogy works in some ways, it also falls flat (as all analogies do) in others. Specifically:
1. Justices are not elected, board members are. 2. Justices cannot be fired for their decisions, board members must run again, and there may be other ways to get rid of them (I do not know). 3. Justices have nothing else to do; this is their full time, paid, job. Board members presumably must put food on their tables, and openSUSE isn't doing it for them. 4. Justices are a little trained in the law, not volunteers who are willing to spend time in order to represent others like them. Board members are trained in whatever they want, likely not related to board membership, or civil service in general. 5. Justices are on an appellate court, meaning they do not try issues the first time, or even the second time (usually), but are the end of the line. They cannot see a problem out in the world and take it on, but somebody must bring a case, with constitutional problems, to them. Board members can focus on things they bring to the table themselves. 6. Justices deal with the law impacting everybody in the land, and those people may not be able to leave the land. Board members... not so much. 7. Justices mostly deal with country-specific issues; Board members deal with those pesky cross-pond people too.
This is not to say that the arguments are all invalid, but some of those qualities of the justices make the case (pun intended) different for them than for our Board members.
Aaron Burgemeister
Hi all,
Le lundi 27 août 2018 à 12:25:31, Patrick Shanahan a écrit :
- James Mason JMason@suse.com [08-27-18 11:44]:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256
On Sat, 2018-08-25 at 22:01 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
The Project elected a Board to do a specific job. We're not Board members as part of some political or business exercise, but to serve the Project in a very specific way, doing an often ugly job so no one else has to.
This has an analogue in juries around the world, an equally thankless task, but important one. One where the words and statements of jurors made during their deliberations cannot be made public.
The outcome of that deliberation, the decision of guilt or innocence, and the number of jurors for and against a decision are shared as an output of those deliberations, but the deliberations themselves are sacrosanct and forbidden from being aired in any court in order to ensure that those decisions can be made without any fear of external influence.
The Board have been elected to a position where they are the final arbiters of any decision that gets to their desk. If an issue gets to their desk it can be argued that it only does so because no other contributor was willing or able to make the decisions via our usual (very public) means. We are after all, decision makers and arbiters of last resort - the community should be taking care of any issue that it can long before it ever ends up needing a Board decision.
I think it is therefore highly important that those decisions which are trusted to the Board, are conducted in a way that empowers each Board member to act on their conscious, without fear of public reprisals after the fact.
The 'jury' analogy only goes so far, as a jury is an imposed responsibility, whereas joining the Board is a public action of choice
- exactly akin to running for office.
There's a reasonable expectation that a representative will share their decisions with their constituency, otherwise there is no check on the validity of their representation. That's a relatively clear and obvious core tenet of representational governing, and yes I'd like to see the Board move that direction.
On the other hand, I do recognize the jurist component, but again, you cannot separate the self-selected public nature of running for the Board, so the only fair comparison is something like the US. Supreme Court, where not only do we know the votes, and an opinion by the group in support of the decision, but any number of dissenting opinions, by those who disagree with the majority. This makes the issue completely transparent, and has the bonus of allowing future Board members the opportunity to understand the decision, and possibly correct for new conditions in the future, without "guessing" at prior intent.
While I understand the decisions of our governing Board may be not quite as dramatic as all that would suggest, I think it's fair and reasonable for the membership to ask for, and if necessary vote to impose, some more transparency from the board; e.g.
- Knowing what issues the Board has voted on, and who voted how.
- Having an opinion from the majority about the decision (this we have
now) 3) Expecting dissenters to the majority opinion to express the nature of their dissent within the bounds of the issue and majority opinion.
sell said, and I also support your ensuing msg. I elect represenative(s) with an expectation of them following the path I determine from their bio and presentations prior to election. I *really* want to know that they are doing as I expect and the *only* way is to see their votes and arguments.
I have read almost all this thread and find the views that people expressed interesting. But surprisingly, the word "trust" is missing. When you vote for someone, you put some trust in this person, believing that she or he will do the thing you consider right. The level of "transparency" some of you ask for, sounds a lot like "justification" to me. I don't want to see each and every member of the Board justify themselves for every decision they make. We vote for members so that they can constitute, all together, the Board which is in charge of taking care of the openSUSE project. So the Board, as an administrative entity if I may say, should be able to explain its decisions when needed (and it did so recently with the local football team support). Taking it at a lower level, i.e. individuals, will only expose them and potentially create conflicts and, in the end, discourage future pretenders.
Am Sonntag, 26. August 2018, 00:57:56 CEST schrieb Bryan Lunduke:
while attacking me, personally
Well, to me personally that sounds like "It seems like Bryan has acchieved his goal (again)". Am I the only one who thinks "I've seen this before? Won't be long until this is a public rant in SME... or a video"? Or is there already ? I didn't check...
This looks like very well-crafted to me. Bryan, this is sad and you don't need to construct things like that - this is Just my private opinion, from a friend that has been knowing (not following like all the other "friends") you for a long time. I fully support you taking a breath and having a break. Maybe you take some time to think about why so many people believe you are an expert in self-victimisation... in private. :-) Why do most rants you are involved in end up in exactly that setting?
Always ready to help a friend. Yes I am. No sarcasm, not kidding.
Hello,
On Fri, 24 Aug 2018 at 21:02, Ana Martínez anamma06@gmail.com wrote:
Board Meeting Minutes of August 21 2018. You can also find them in the Wiki: https://en.opensuse.org/Archive:Board_meeting_2018-08-21 Enjoy reading! ;)
snipped<
== DevFest'18- VIT Vellore ==
Is it the one from Tamilnadu state in India? Thanks.
Regards, Amey.
ACTION: Knurpht will write back asking more details
= Update membership information =
ACTION: Richard and Knurpht will try to update the information in the next month
--
Ana María Martínez Gómez
http://anamaria.martinezgomez.name
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On 2018-08-27 11:43, James Mason wrote:
On Sat, 2018-08-25 at 22:01 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
The Project elected a Board to do a specific job. We're not Board members as part of some political or business exercise, but to serve the Project in a very specific way, doing an often ugly job so no one else has to.
This has an analogue in juries around the world, an equally thankless task, but important one. One where the words and statements of jurors made during their deliberations cannot be made public.
The outcome of that deliberation, the decision of guilt or innocence, and the number of jurors for and against a decision are shared as an output of those deliberations, but the deliberations themselves are sacrosanct and forbidden from being aired in any court in order to ensure that those decisions can be made without any fear of external influence.
The Board have been elected to a position where they are the final arbiters of any decision that gets to their desk. If an issue gets to their desk it can be argued that it only does so because no other contributor was willing or able to make the decisions via our usual (very public) means. We are after all, decision makers and arbiters of last resort - the community should be taking care of any issue that it can long before it ever ends up needing a Board decision.
I think it is therefore highly important that those decisions which are trusted to the Board, are conducted in a way that empowers each Board member to act on their conscious, without fear of public reprisals after the fact.
The 'jury' analogy only goes so far, as a jury is an imposed responsibility, whereas joining the Board is a public action of choice
- exactly akin to running for office.
There is also the professional jury people - maybe wrong name, not jury. In my country, they decide then write a decision, but dissenting members write their own writeup if they wish. And these are public, so we know who voted what and who disagreed.
There's a reasonable expectation that a representative will share their decisions with their constituency, otherwise there is no check on the validity of their representation. That's a relatively clear and obvious core tenet of representational governing, and yes I'd like to see the Board move that direction.
Me too.
On the other hand, I do recognize the jurist component, but again, you cannot separate the self-selected public nature of running for the Board, so the only fair comparison is something like the US. Supreme Court, where not only do we know the votes, and an opinion by the group in support of the decision, but any number of dissenting opinions, by those who disagree with the majority. This makes the issue completely transparent, and has the bonus of allowing future Board members the opportunity to understand the decision, and possibly correct for new conditions in the future, without "guessing" at prior intent.
Right.
While I understand the decisions of our governing Board may be not quite as dramatic as all that would suggest, I think it's fair and reasonable for the membership to ask for, and if necessary vote to impose, some more transparency from the board; e.g.
- Knowing what issues the Board has voted on, and who voted how.
- Having an opinion from the majority about the decision (this we have
now) 3) Expecting dissenters to the majority opinion to express the nature of their dissent within the bounds of the issue and majority opinion.
Right.
On 2018-08-27 01:54, Basil Chupin wrote:
On 27/08/18 07:39, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
- Knurpht-openSUSE knurpht@opensuse.org [08-26-18 16:57]:
[...]
I am open for discussion, Per. But I don't believe in total transparency where names are involved f.e. or details of conflicts are revealed.
it is about where you or the individual stands on the issues, not about "conflicts" which should not happen. differences of opinion are expected and needed to resolve issues, that they be understood.
I would definitely want to know how one voted as I may have an opinion about particular issue and want to vote for someone who follows what I expect. how else can one determine who they want to represent them?
I agree with what you say.
I also would like to add a thought which only now just occurred to me -- you'll see why I say this in a minute.
Over the years I have been on many committees, more like 'boards' if you like, and on one I was the Secretary with one my responsibilities, of course, was to produce the detailed Minutes of the 'board's' ordinary and extraordinary meetings.
The Minutes naturally contained the usual words of "Motion passed unanimously" or "Passed by majority votes" or similar wording. After the Minutes were written-up they were circulated as a draft to all 'board' members for correction/addition/approval before I produced the final version to be adopted as the official record of the meeting at the next meeting of the 'board'.
The thought which only just now occurred to me is: while the Minutes may have stated that some Motion was approved by a majority of 'board' members there was never a list of who voted for or against the Motion. It just never occurred to anyone to have such a list included in the Minutes.
Alright, when you think about it doing so would become a tedious task -- but there is a very simple solution to this. The draft Minutes are circulated to each Member for correction/etc before being finalised so during this editing stage the member(s) who voted AGAINST a motion adds his/her name(s) stating "Voted Against: Joe Doe, Mary Contrary,...". Since the members present at that meeting are always listed at the beginning of the Minutes it becomes clear by elimination who voted FOR the motion.
Nice, I like it :-)
It would be up to the dissenting member to say something or not.
This would produce the transparency which you, Patrick, and, I will add, also other Community members, is requesting in what you wrote above.
it appears embarassment and or blame are being considered and they should never enter into the process.
This should be considered as self-evident.
BC
On 2018-08-27 13:02, James Mason wrote:
On Mon, 2018-08-27 at 18:33 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
The banned individual has been successful in rehabilitating themselves, and the Board members have returned to non-Board life, in a way that I am certain would not have been possible if they were aware of the details of who voted for what when.
The fact that you can use it as an example now exactly supports my point. In your example, the rehabilitated member could just as easily look at who was on the board at the time and blame everyone equally - hiding the votes doesn't shield members of the board, it just creates opacity.
As I was one of the banned people once, that is exactly how I feel.
Hello,
Am Dienstag, 28. August 2018, 11:31:04 CEST schrieb Amey Abhyankar:
On Fri, 24 Aug 2018 at 21:02, Ana Martínez anamma06@gmail.com wrote:
Board Meeting Minutes of August 21 2018.
== DevFest'18- VIT Vellore ==
Is it the one from Tamilnadu state in India? Thanks.
I have to admit that my geography knownledge of India is very limited, therefore I'll just give you the link ;-)
If you remove the subdomain, https://dscvit.com/ even has a map ;-)
Regards,
Christian Boltz
On Thu, 30 Aug 2018 at 02:43, Christian Boltz opensuse@cboltz.de wrote:
Hello,
Am Dienstag, 28. August 2018, 11:31:04 CEST schrieb Amey Abhyankar:
On Fri, 24 Aug 2018 at 21:02, Ana Martínez anamma06@gmail.com wrote:
Board Meeting Minutes of August 21 2018.
== DevFest'18- VIT Vellore ==
Is it the one from Tamilnadu state in India? Thanks.
I have to admit that my geography knownledge of India is very limited, therefore I'll just give you the link ;-)
Thanks Christian.
There are cities/areas in Sri Lanka [our neighbor country] too with same names & in some parts of South India too. For the same, I 1st wanted to confirm that yes this Vellore is from India & then it's in Tamilnadu province/state :-)
As per the 'MOM' by Ana, Knurpht will write back.
@Knurpht: Pls let me know if I can help in any way. Although I live 1000+ km/ 620+ miles away from Vellore city, my location falls in same time zone. :-) I can definitely call them to take follow up's if required over telephonic/voice call.
As per the DevFest URL i.e. https://devfest.dscvit.com/ dates seems to be 6th & 7th Oct i.e. Sat & Sun. Let me check If I can travel there by over night train from my city i.e. Pune. I'll also ping Shobha Tyagi to know if she is traveling from Delhi to the DevFest.
Regards, Amey.
If you remove the subdomain, https://dscvit.com/ even has a map ;-)
Regards,
Christian Boltz
Expected Results: This is Linux. Kernel and crash are mutually exclusive :-) [Volker Kuhlmann in https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=743936]
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org
In Germany, most elected boards have a fairly differenciated approach: For different tasks, different voting systems will apply. Simple Majority, 2/3 or even 3/4 are merely examples. But they also use different voting procedures: Vote by raising hand, secret vote, written and named votes (which is the ultimate transparent if the results are shared, because it can be reproduced at any given time). I guess there is no solution that matches all situations, and it is good practice in democratic systems to make use of all options, adapted to the needs of a situation. I guess the board can set up its own rules for that, can't they?
Am Mittwoch, 29. August 2018, 18:54:33 CEST schrieb Carlos E. R.:
On 2018-08-27 11:43, James Mason wrote:
On Sat, 2018-08-25 at 22:01 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
The Project elected a Board to do a specific job. We're not Board members as part of some political or business exercise, but to serve the Project in a very specific way, doing an often ugly job so no one else has to.
This has an analogue in juries around the world, an equally thankless task, but important one. One where the words and statements of jurors made during their deliberations cannot be made public.
The outcome of that deliberation, the decision of guilt or innocence, and the number of jurors for and against a decision are shared as an output of those deliberations, but the deliberations themselves are sacrosanct and forbidden from being aired in any court in order to ensure that those decisions can be made without any fear of external influence.
The Board have been elected to a position where they are the final arbiters of any decision that gets to their desk. If an issue gets to their desk it can be argued that it only does so because no other contributor was willing or able to make the decisions via our usual (very public) means. We are after all, decision makers and arbiters of last resort - the community should be taking care of any issue that it can long before it ever ends up needing a Board decision.
I think it is therefore highly important that those decisions which are trusted to the Board, are conducted in a way that empowers each Board member to act on their conscious, without fear of public reprisals after the fact.
The 'jury' analogy only goes so far, as a jury is an imposed responsibility, whereas joining the Board is a public action of choice
- exactly akin to running for office.
There is also the professional jury people - maybe wrong name, not jury. In my country, they decide then write a decision, but dissenting members write their own writeup if they wish. And these are public, so we know who voted what and who disagreed.
There's a reasonable expectation that a representative will share their decisions with their constituency, otherwise there is no check on the validity of their representation. That's a relatively clear and obvious core tenet of representational governing, and yes I'd like to see the Board move that direction.
Me too.
On the other hand, I do recognize the jurist component, but again, you cannot separate the self-selected public nature of running for the Board, so the only fair comparison is something like the US. Supreme Court, where not only do we know the votes, and an opinion by the group in support of the decision, but any number of dissenting opinions, by those who disagree with the majority. This makes the issue completely transparent, and has the bonus of allowing future Board members the opportunity to understand the decision, and possibly correct for new conditions in the future, without "guessing" at prior intent.
Right.
While I understand the decisions of our governing Board may be not quite as dramatic as all that would suggest, I think it's fair and reasonable for the membership to ask for, and if necessary vote to impose, some more transparency from the board; e.g.
- Knowing what issues the Board has voted on, and who voted how.
- Having an opinion from the majority about the decision (this we have
now) 3) Expecting dissenters to the majority opinion to express the nature of their dissent within the bounds of the issue and majority opinion.
Right.
On Thursday, 30 August 2018 16:40:43 ACST, Markus Feilner wrote:
In Germany, most elected boards have a fairly differenciated approach: For different tasks, different voting systems will apply. Simple Majority, 2/3 or even 3/4 are merely examples. But they also use different voting procedures: Vote by raising hand, secret vote, written and named votes (which is the ultimate transparent if the results are shared, because it can be reproduced at any given time). I guess there is no solution that matches all situations, and it is good practice in democratic systems to make use of all options, adapted to the needs of a situation. I guess the board can set up its own rules for that, can't they?
For most things yes we can do what we want, there are some exceptions though like for example its documented that removing a board member requires 2/3 of the other board members, generally we vote kinda by hand raise (well as well as that works in a video conference call)
Op donderdag 30 augustus 2018 08:23:31 CEST schreef Amey Abhyankar:
On Thu, 30 Aug 2018 at 02:43, Christian Boltz opensuse@cboltz.de wrote:
Hello,
Am Dienstag, 28. August 2018, 11:31:04 CEST schrieb Amey Abhyankar:
On Fri, 24 Aug 2018 at 21:02, Ana Martínez anamma06@gmail.com wrote:
Board Meeting Minutes of August 21 2018.
== DevFest'18- VIT Vellore ==
Is it the one from Tamilnadu state in India? Thanks.
I have to admit that my geography knownledge of India is very limited, therefore I'll just give you the link ;-)
Thanks Christian.
There are cities/areas in Sri Lanka [our neighbor country] too with same names & in some parts of South India too. For the same, I 1st wanted to confirm that yes this Vellore is from India & then it's in Tamilnadu province/state :-)
As per the 'MOM' by Ana, Knurpht will write back.
@Knurpht: Pls let me know if I can help in any way. Although I live 1000+ km/ 620+ miles away from Vellore city, my location falls in same time zone. :-) I can definitely call them to take follow up's if required over telephonic/voice call.
As per the DevFest URL i.e. https://devfest.dscvit.com/ dates seems to be 6th & 7th Oct i.e. Sat & Sun. Let me check If I can travel there by over night train from my city i.e. Pune. I'll also ping Shobha Tyagi to know if she is traveling from Delhi to the DevFest.
Regards, Amey.
Hey Amey, thanks for jumping in. That would definitely be great if some openSUSE community members would be present. I already checked their website, which looks great btw. I've already been in touch with Meherdeep Thakur from the organization. If you want to, I can ask him if I can pass his email and tel. nr. to you. Please send me a private email or contact me through Messenger if so.
If you remove the subdomain, https://dscvit.com/ even has a map ;-)
Regards,
Christian Boltz
Expected Results: This is Linux. Kernel and crash are mutually exclusive :-) [Volker Kuhlmann in https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=743936]
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org
On Mon, 27 Aug 2018 18:33:52 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
On Mon, 27 Aug 2018 at 17:48, James Mason JMason@suse.com wrote:
If one doesn't want to make their opinions public, for whatever reason, they should not run for office.
Fair points, but, unlike the Supreme court, Board membership is not for life.
Let me give a real world example, as much as I can.
This feels a lot like a 'slippery slope' argument to me, Richard.
To me this is a pretty straightforward thing: Default to "open" unless there's a really good reason to not be open (for example, the privacy of a third party).
Take a look at how kernel patches are handled - generally open, but in the case of Spectre/Meltdown, those patches needed to be handled in a closed manner until all OS vendors had an opportunity to address the issues - "responsible disclosure" overrode the need for openness.
That doesn't mean that because there's occasionally a need to do things behind closed doors, all kernel patches are handled behind closed doors. The process defaults to open unless there's a compelling reason to not be open.
The same principle applies here.
On Sat, 1 Sep 2018 at 16:00, Jim Henderson hendersj@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, 27 Aug 2018 18:33:52 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
On Mon, 27 Aug 2018 at 17:48, James Mason JMason@suse.com wrote:
If one doesn't want to make their opinions public, for whatever reason, they should not run for office.
Fair points, but, unlike the Supreme court, Board membership is not for life.
Let me give a real world example, as much as I can.
This feels a lot like a 'slippery slope' argument to me, Richard.
To me this is a pretty straightforward thing: Default to "open" unless there's a really good reason to not be open (for example, the privacy of a third party).
Take a look at how kernel patches are handled - generally open, but in the case of Spectre/Meltdown, those patches needed to be handled in a closed manner until all OS vendors had an opportunity to address the issues - "responsible disclosure" overrode the need for openness.
That doesn't mean that because there's occasionally a need to do things behind closed doors, all kernel patches are handled behind closed doors. The process defaults to open unless there's a compelling reason to not be open.
The same principle applies here.
I wouldn't describe my points as a 'slippery slope' argument, more like the 'wrong slope' argument
If the issue being presented to the Board is one that can be handled "in the open" in the way that you and others are advocating, then I argue that the issue shouldn't be presented to the Board as something for it to decide.
We support contributors who take the initiative, and when that is not an option we have the project mailinglist and countless other places and means for such things to be debated and decided.
The Board exist to be able to make the decisions that can't be handled in such an open fashion. And thus, we require the trust of the Project in order to be able to do our job with the discretion required of it.
Le samedi 01 septembre 2018, à 21:07 -0700, Richard Brown a écrit :
If the issue being presented to the Board is one that can be handled "in the open" in the way that you and others are advocating, then I argue that the issue shouldn't be presented to the Board as something for it to decide.
We support contributors who take the initiative, and when that is not an option we have the project mailinglist and countless other places and means for such things to be debated and decided.
The Board exist to be able to make the decisions that can't be handled in such an open fashion. And thus, we require the trust of the Project in order to be able to do our job with the discretion required of it.
This is true when this is when it comes to handling a conflict, but the board does more than that: for instance, it has an influence on the budget, or the organization of oSC, and more.
What I understand that people are pointing out is that these other topics do not need as much discretion, and transparency is expected there.
The way this can be approached, and that is pretty close to what I feel the current board is doing, is that by default, topics should be considered as "to be documented publicly" unless there's a good reason to not do so -- and I'm being vague here on purpose as you can't predict what topic may not be appropriate to detail in minutes; I trust the board to take the right decision.
The minutes that have been shared lately already offer some pretty good transparency (although votes are not included -- which I'm fine with). If anything, I feel the board has actually been too transparent about the conflicts in the minutes as it's something I would simply not document publicly as it can influence the conflict resolution negatively.
Vincent
On Sun, 2 Sep 2018 at 00:15, Vincent Untz vuntz@opensuse.org wrote:
Le samedi 01 septembre 2018, à 21:07 -0700, Richard Brown a écrit :
If the issue being presented to the Board is one that can be handled "in the open" in the way that you and others are advocating, then I argue that the issue shouldn't be presented to the Board as something for it to decide.
We support contributors who take the initiative, and when that is not an option we have the project mailinglist and countless other places and means for such things to be debated and decided.
The Board exist to be able to make the decisions that can't be handled in such an open fashion. And thus, we require the trust of the Project in order to be able to do our job with the discretion required of it.
This is true when this is when it comes to handling a conflict, but the board does more than that: for instance, it has an influence on the budget, or the organization of oSC, and more.
What I understand that people are pointing out is that these other topics do not need as much discretion, and transparency is expected there.
The way this can be approached, and that is pretty close to what I feel the current board is doing, is that by default, topics should be considered as "to be documented publicly" unless there's a good reason to not do so -- and I'm being vague here on purpose as you can't predict what topic may not be appropriate to detail in minutes; I trust the board to take the right decision.
The minutes that have been shared lately already offer some pretty good transparency (although votes are not included -- which I'm fine with). If anything, I feel the board has actually been too transparent about the conflicts in the minutes as it's something I would simply not document publicly as it can influence the conflict resolution negatively.
Vincent
The only topic I have been debating here is whether or not the Board should include the details of whom voted for what
Of course the Board should minute what it discusses, I do not disagree on that point with you one iota and I would defend any suggestion otherwise as vociferously as I am defending the need to note include the details of votes in our minutes.
That said, like you, I fear we've been TOO transparent in areas like conflict resolution from time to time, but the fact we err on the side of openness should be somewhat reassuring to the Project. But sharing the details of whom voted for what is a step that I, personally, think is far too far - partially because it strips the Board from the collective responsibility that has given it the freedom to both learn from its mistakes and to take risks like occasionally being too open in its minutes.
However, returning to your point about the Board doing "more than just conflict resolution" - This may be true, heck we sure seem busier than when you were Chairman ;) but the nature and scope of the work has evolved since your time.
Taking your examples, Budget influence is far less than in the past - because the role of Treasurer we created has succeeded in it's intended role of taking a lot of that day-to-day noise away from the Board. Therefore, when the Board is now discussing budgets, it's almost always (and in my eyes should always) be in a form of 'escalation mode' - discussing topics which our Treasurer or others in the Project cannot handle comfortably. Every example I can think of could easily be described as a "conflict" between the desires of the Project and the desires of our sponsors. And ergo, those incidents are some which require heaps of discretion and benefit from the obscured voting which we currently practice in the Board.
oSC influence is another example you cited. It's true that in the past the Board was very hands on with the organisation of oSC. I've been campaigning hard within the Board to stop that practice as it is beyond the intended remit of the Board. Earlier in the thread I gave the example of openSUSE Asia as a fine example of how the Project could be doing such things. We have this list, and opensuse-marketing, and a growing body of experienced oSC volunteers. I work hard to ensure that any question about organisational minutiae or any other aspect of oSC, or in general any topic at all, that could be discussed and documented in the open, is NOT discussed by the Board at our meetings. That is not our job and never has been. In cases like that I've been working hard to push the people raising such things to do so openly with the project, and on one or two occasions I have strongly advocated to the Board that we should reject the questions asked of us, because they're not for us to decide.
The Project should be able to do and decide things without the Board. We were never conceptualised as a gate to block or permit what our contributors wanted to do. The power of deciding what we do, how we do it, when we do it, lies with our contributors, not with the Board.
The Board is there to serve a purpose when that typical open collaborative means of this project doesn't work. When conflicts are abound and when discretion is required. When something needs to be handled delicately and yet still decisively in the name of the Project. Those are the functions the Board exists, and so to risk repeating myself, if the topic is one which can easily be handled openly and could be wholly minuted openly without any discretion required, it's a topic I'd personally like to see handled elsewhere then the Board.
We've got enough ugly stuff to deal with, and the Project has better means for doing and deciding stuff openly.
For example, I'd love to start seeing this list being used more proactively by others for postulating and discussing far more new ideas for the Project, and then the collective readers of this list taking the initiative and acting on them. The Boards minutes and the debates around them should be a minority activity of this list, not the majority it seems to have been lately.
Hi,
I am happy to see that many people giving their opinion about what the board discusses in its meetings, but also really disappointed with the tone of some of the discussions and that some people got offended. After that much polemic, I think I should also give my opinion on the topic. In my view, there are two kind of ways the board makes a decision:
- We manage to agree on something That means that even if I disagree on the first place, the arguments of the others make that I agree after discussing it. In this case, I of course agree and support the decision. I think this is the most normal case.
- We don't manage to agree and need to vote to decide In this case I accept and respect the decision because it was democratically voted, but I do not agree on it. That means that if someone ask me, both privately and publicly, I will still defend my opinion. Richard says that decisions made collectively are defended collectively. I don't know if the board decided this in the past, in which case it should be documented somewhere and re-discuss when new members join. But I have never agreed that I should defend something I don't agree with.
I also would like to clarify how the discussion about the football team was, just because I have the feeling that people have the impression that it was much worse than it really was. After the voting, I remember saying that we should put it in the minutes to see what the community thinks of such an unusual sponsorship and that everybody agreed. My perception was that it was not something confidential at all and because of that it was fine for everybody that I give my opinion about it. After realizing that it was not fine for everybody, I brought the topic to the last meeting. I would like to mention two points made during the last board meeting, which were the reason why I answered to the mailing list to apologize: - I used the first opportunity I had to make clear in public I disagreed with the decision, without nobody asking me. - Making use of my right to make my opinion public, I was in this case making everybody else opinion public, without knowing for sure if it was ok for them.
After that many answers in this email thread I think the board should discuss in the next meeting if we should make public who voted what (I'll ensure this happens). As others already gave their opinion, here is mine: When the board doesn't agree on something, but votes about it, who voted what should be public except if there is a good reason to not make it public (the reason should be included in the minutes). That includes for example, that we are resolving a conflict for which people wrote as expecting anonymity and that it is discussed in private.
To finish - this is email is getting as long as one from Richard ;) - I would like to give my opinion about something Richard said:
The fact we do every vote transparently means that on a rolling basis, every Board member has a perception of their popularity (or lack of it) compared to their peers in the Board
openSUSE is not a company but a community (as Richard and Knurpht have pointed out). In a company it may happen that the company interests are not the same ones as the employees interests. But in the openSUSE board we are just trying to take the best decisions for the community which represent what the community wants. This in my opinion means that the decisions we make should be popular. Otherwise we are taking the wrong decisions.
Regards,
Ana
On Sat, 01 Sep 2018 21:07:48 -0700, Richard Brown wrote:
I wouldn't describe my points as a 'slippery slope' argument, more like the 'wrong slope' argument
I'm not sure I agree - I'll have to give that some thought.
If the issue being presented to the Board is one that can be handled "in the open" in the way that you and others are advocating, then I argue that the issue shouldn't be presented to the Board as something for it to decide.
Then maybe the issue that started this wasn't appropriate for the board to decide, and should have been put to the membership.
Or...Maybe the function of the board is to distill the will of the project membership for decisions like this, as well as to deal with things that *are* best handled out of the public eye.
We support contributors who take the initiative, and when that is not an option we have the project mailinglist and countless other places and means for such things to be debated and decided.
Sure. But in the RACI chart for the project, the board *must* be accountable to the membership that elected them. That's why the board minutes are published, in part (so I assume).
The Board exist to be able to make the decisions that can't be handled in such an open fashion. And thus, we require the trust of the Project in order to be able to do our job with the discretion required of it.
Richard, you know that I trust the board. But that said, there's a question of accountability - "trust, but verify" is important for the membership to know that the board is doing what they were elected to do.
In order to make an informed decision when someone runs for a second term on the board, how is anyone to know that the person they're voting for is representing their interests if the decisions they make (or votes they cast) aren't open to public review?
Jim
On Sun, 2 Sep 2018 at 19:49, Ana Martínez anamma06@gmail.com wrote:
- We don't manage to agree and need to vote to decide
In this case I accept and respect the decision because it was democratically voted, but I do not agree on it. That means that if someone ask me, both privately and publicly, I will still defend my opinion. Richard says that decisions made collectively are defended collectively. I don't know if the board decided this in the past, in which case it should be documented somewhere and re-discuss when new members join. But I have never agreed that I should defend something I don't agree with.
When you joined the Board, you joined a decision making body that works as a Team. I expect any team member to support the decisions made of that team. Equally, I expect a well rounded team to also be supportive and open with dissent and complexity in their decision-making.
I have no problem with the diversity of thought among the Board being public knowledge, but I do have a problem when that transitions from sharing the fact the board contains more than one opinion, to Board members publicly undermining the decision made by the collective whole group.
This is one of the benefits that comes with the details of whom voted for what being private. As a Board we could share both the majority and minority views on any decisions.
But as soon as names are attached the whole affair takes an air of a childish popularity contest, which detracts from the Boards ability to make decisions in awkward circumstances - which is the only kind of decisions the Board should be making.
Therefore I continue to strongly disagree with many of your views here, and fear if they gained acceptance the Board's ability to function in the roles it exists for will be grossly undermined.
We might get fuzzy feelings of self satisfaction by being more open and bragging about our individual decisions, but we risk turning the Board into a spectator sport or reality show drama, and not the only body the Project has to turn to in order make decisions when all other means fail it.
After that many answers in this email thread I think the board should discuss in the next meeting if we should make public who voted what (I'll ensure this happens).
I think it would be grossly inappropriate for the Board to discuss in private something we have collectively proven to be able to discuss in public.
The fact that we're still having this conversation here means that any move to discuss this in the Board tonight would seem to be to be both hypocritical in the goal for more transparency, and the view that the Board meetings should be focused on topics which cannot be discussed openly.
Therefore I will be objecting to any suggestion that we discuss this at tonight's meeting.
We should keep talking about this here.
As others already gave their opinion, here is mine: When the board doesn't agree on something, but votes about it, who voted what should be public except if there is a good reason to not make it public (the reason should be included in the minutes). That includes for example, that we are resolving a conflict for which people wrote as expecting anonymity and that it is discussed in private.
I agree with your principle. My point is, the Board should only be deciding on topics where there is a good reason not to make it public.
openSUSE is not a company but a community (as Richard and Knurpht have pointed out). In a company it may happen that the company interests are not the same ones as the employees interests. But in the openSUSE board we are just trying to take the best decisions for the community which represent what the community wants. This in my opinion means that the decisions we make should be popular. Otherwise we are taking the wrong decisions.
Ana, our responsibility as a Board to make decisions in circumstances where a popular vote would be inappropriate.
Taking decisions regarding conflicting members, rejecting/establishing relationships with other Projects and companies, and spending the money from our existing sponsors, always has the risk of being unpopular.
We have the Board so the Project has people who can make unpopular, but trusted decisions.
If the Board's function is only to make popular decisions, then we might as well not have a Board and put everything to a popular vote. And such an option is not viable in many of those cases.
I'm happy to take from this lesson the collective decision that the Board will make less decisions and I will support any effort in the Board to push back from requests for it to make decisions and instead encourage more public debate and public decision making.
But I outright reject your suggestion that the popularity of a decision should be a primary factor of the Boards decision making process. Such a suggestion would be particularly disruptive in our role as conflict resolvers - popular people can still be assholes, and the Board is who the Project needs to rely on to deal with such individuals. They shouldn't be shielded by their popularity.
In the case of sponsorships, there is also the factor of who our sponsors are willing and enable to entrust with the decisions on how the Project spends their money. I can imagine many of our sponsors would be uncomfortable with the idea of their money being up for a public vote. Investigating the feasibility of such an idea might be a topic worthy of discussing in tonights meeting.
Regards,
Richard
Jim Henderson wrote:
Richard, you know that I trust the board. But that said, there's a question of accountability - "trust, but verify" is important for the membership to know that the board is doing what they were elected to do.
In order to make an informed decision when someone runs for a second term on the board, how is anyone to know that the person they're voting for is representing their interests if the decisions they make (or votes they cast) aren't open to public review?
Thanks for putting it so succinctly, that's exactly what I tried to say a few days back.
On Sun, 2 Sep 2018 at 22:47, Jim Henderson hendersj@gmail.com wrote:
Richard, you know that I trust the board. But that said, there's a question of accountability - "trust, but verify" is important for the membership to know that the board is doing what they were elected to do.
In order to make an informed decision when someone runs for a second term on the board, how is anyone to know that the person they're voting for is representing their interests if the decisions they make (or votes they cast) aren't open to public review?
The same information that you had and have to vote on any other Board member candidate in the project.
Board Membership should not be the sole contribution that any individual makes to the Project
Their should be plenty of other examples regarding existing Board members opinions, work ethic, and other factors to help anyone assist where to put their votes, just as their is for when voting for new Board members.
We have our strict 2 term limit for many reasons, but I understand one of them was the assumption that the Board will be voting in private.
While talking about such rules, it's also worth pointing out the Project's right to recall a Board.
There is no provision in our rules for the Project to call for the resignation or removal of a single Board member.
But there IS a provision for the entire Board to be re-elected. The threshold for this is currently if 20% of the Membership call for it. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_rules
This rule and the very low threshold for recall only makes sense BECAUSE of the expectation that the Board will be making decisions as a collective. Otherwise it would be madness to have such a rule constituted in a way.
If we are seriously thinking about forcing the Board to publish the exact votes of each individual member, then I think we need a full review of all our entire constitution and ruleset.
I feel the ability for the Project to individually call for the removal of a specific Board member would be one rule that must be added in such a case.
And I would argue that the rule for the entire Board to be re-elected if 20% of the Membership call for it should be altered, either with a much higher threshold, or removed entirely.
Hey,
On 04.09.2018 10:03, Richard Brown wrote:
We might get fuzzy feelings of self satisfaction by being more open and bragging about our individual decisions, but we risk turning the Board into a spectator sport or reality show drama
Richard, when you where appointed by SUSE as the chairman of the openSUSE board, you joined a community of people who work as a team.
Our guiding principles expect from everyone, including you, to value openness. To value transparency of the decision making & collaboration processes, transparency of communication. The same guiding principles encourage you to _listen_ to arguments and to address problems in a constructive and open way.
I personally don't see how painting everything in black and white helps to bring this exchange of ideas to a collaborative end. Or how behaving this way is reconcilable with our guiding principles.
There are many people in this thread who try to address the gray areas in between, who acknowledge the fact that there is something in between "fuzzy feelings" and "reality show drama". Please open your mind, that is what this community, and the principles it's founded on, expect from everyone.
Henne
On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 12:05, Henne Vogelsang hvogel@opensuse.org wrote:
Richard, when you where appointed by SUSE as the chairman of the openSUSE board, you joined a community of people who work as a team.
As you well know, I was part of that community long before my involvement in it's Board, as both an elected member and then it's Chairman.
I feel your dismissal of that undermines your points below regarding our guiding principles, especially those relating to "respect for others and their work"
Our guiding principles expect from everyone, including you, to value openness. To value transparency of the decision making & collaboration processes, transparency of communication. The same guiding principles encourage you to _listen_ to arguments and to address problems in a constructive and open way.
I personally don't see how painting everything in black and white helps to bring this exchange of ideas to a collaborative end. Or how behaving this way is reconcilable with our guiding principles.
There are many people in this thread who try to address the gray areas in between, who acknowledge the fact that there is something in between "fuzzy feelings" and "reality show drama". Please open your mind, that is what this community, and the principles it's founded on, expect from everyone.
And I believe throughout this thread I have shown a repeated effort to listen and understand.
Of course there is significant amount of grey areas, and this discussion has most certainly helped evolve my position. I wouldn't describe my current views as simple black and white, and you can see examples of that in much of the mail you neglected to quote. Specifically the areas where I state
"I have no problem with the diversity of thought among the Board being public knowledge, but I do have a problem when that transitions from sharing the fact the board contains more than one opinion, to Board members publicly undermining the decision made by the collective whole group."
"As a Board we could share both the majority and minority views on any decisions."
"I'm happy to take from this lesson the collective decision that the Board will make less decisions and I will support any effort in the Board to push back from requests for it to make decisions and instead encourage more public debate and public decision making."
Each of the above statements can be directly attributed to my _listening_ to the arguments and addressing them.
Regardless, I have principles which I both personally hold, and that I feel responsible for upholding in order to preserve the environment the Board fulfils its function. I have striven hard throughout this discussion to communicate my views respectfully and thoroughly, while considering and addressing any opposing views.
So, how about we try our collective best to avoid ad hominem attacks, and continue to discuss the issues at hand?
El mar., 4 sept. 2018 a las 10:04, Richard Brown (RBrownCCB@opensuse.org) escribió:
On Sun, 2 Sep 2018 at 19:49, Ana Martínez anamma06@gmail.com wrote:
When you joined the Board, you joined a decision making body that works as a Team. I expect any team member to support the decisions made of that team. Equally, I expect a well rounded team to also be supportive and open with dissent and complexity in their decision-making.
In our Wiki page[1] does not say anything about supporting decisions a board member don't agree with. But it does say that the board should document decisions and policies. When things are not documented neither discussed, it is normal that your expectations and mines are different.
After that many answers in this email thread I think the board should discuss in the next meeting if we should make public who voted what (I'll ensure this happens).
I think it would be grossly inappropriate for the Board to discuss in private something we have collectively proven to be able to discuss in public.
The fact that we're still having this conversation here means that any move to discuss this in the Board tonight would seem to be to be both hypocritical in the goal for more transparency, and the view that the Board meetings should be focused on topics which cannot be discussed openly. Therefore I will be objecting to any suggestion that we discuss this at tonight's meeting.
I object to not discuss it. 💔
From this thread I get that:
- Community wants the votes to be public - I want them to be public - You want them to be private - I am not sure what the other board members want
I would like to know what the others in the board think. More information is always a good thing. 😍 I think I am on my right to add things to discuss in our meeting as everybody else in the board. I do not see the problem to discuss something in private after we received feedback from the community always that this is properly documented in our minutes.
As others already gave their opinion, here is mine: When the board doesn't agree on something, but votes about it, who voted what should be public except if there is a good reason to not make it public (the reason should be included in the minutes). That includes for example, that we are resolving a conflict for which people wrote as expecting anonymity and that it is discussed in private.
I agree with your principle. My point is, the Board should only be deciding on topics where there is a good reason not to make it public.
What was the good reason for the board to decide on the football team and not to make it public?
We have the Board so the Project has people who can make unpopular, but trusted decisions.
I disagree. I believe the Board should make popular decisions, which represent what the community wants.
From our Wiki[1]: Facilitate decision making processes where needed.
Facilitate decision is not the same as decide and it also doesn't include anything about unpopular decisions.
If the Board's function is only to make popular decisions, then we might as well not have a Board and put everything to a popular vote. And such an option is not viable in many of those cases.
I really like the idea for the cases in which it is possible. 😘
Regards,
Ana
[1] - https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board
On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 12:53, Ana Martínez anamma06@gmail.com wrote:
In our Wiki page[1] does not say anything about supporting decisions a board member don't agree with. But it does say that the board should document decisions and policies. When things are not documented neither discussed, it is normal that your expectations and mines are different.
The Board should document decisions and policies.
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.
Everything we've ever documented about "The Board" speaks of the Board as a team which is accountable as a single unit. Hence the rule that _the Board_ can be removed by 20% of the members requesting it.
Everything in our rules implies the Board should be acting as a collective unit, and is collectively accountable. Nothing I can find in our rules implies that Board members should be held individually accountable.
Hence, my opinion at the topics being discussed in this thread that the Board should act in accordance to those principles.
I object to not discuss it.
From this thread I get that:
- Community wants the votes to be public
Some of the community wants the votes to be public. There are others who do not.
- I want them to be public
- You want them to be private
- I am not sure what the other board members want
I would like to know what the others in the board think. More information is always a good thing.
I would also like to know what the others in the Board feel. Given the discussion so far has been done wholly in public, I believe that those other Board members should engage in this topic publicly also.
I have always disagreed with the idea that the Board deciding things in private which could be decided in public. Like our wiki page says "community mechanisms exist to accomplish the goals of the project".
This is one of those mechanisms, and taking the discussion on this topic privately now would be closing the stable door after the horse is long bolted.
I agree with your principle. My point is, the Board should only be deciding on topics where there is a good reason not to make it public.
What was the good reason for the board to decide on the football team and not to make it public?
Because, unlike the vast amount of other sponsorships which the Project decides upon without the Board's direct involvement, the unusual nature of this one led to the marketing team (who normally decide on sponsorships) asking the Board for our opinion.
We have the Board so the Project has people who can make unpopular, but trusted decisions.
I disagree. I believe the Board should make popular decisions, which represent what the community wants.
From our Wiki[1]: Facilitate decision making processes where needed. Facilitate decision is not the same as decide and it also doesn't include anything about unpopular decisions.
Indeed, so on the topic that decided this, I think there is a case to be made that the Board could consider suggesting a way to allow the marketing team to decide about sponsorships without involving the Board. I would fully support such an effort.
But without such a way, we end up being the only process left
And that process in which the Board makes decisions is one which doesn't make those votes public, because the Board is designed and structured for making decisions only in cases where no other process or community mechanisms exist.
The Board should only be making decisions _as_a_last_resort_.
When that is the case, we need to have the freedom to make those decisions with private voting (but public minuting).
As many decisions as possible should be made by people other than the Board - like our wiki says "community mechanisms exist to accomplish the goals of the project" - the Board is there for when those community mechanisms don't exist, or fail to work for the Project.
If the Board's function is only to make popular decisions, then we might as well not have a Board and put everything to a popular vote. And such an option is not viable in many of those cases.
I really like the idea for the cases in which it is possible.
I really think those cases should be none of the Board's business, and should be handled elsewhere in the Project.
Hey,
On 04.09.2018 12:38, Richard Brown wrote:
On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 12:05, Henne Vogelsang hvogel@opensuse.org wrote:
Richard, when you where appointed by SUSE as the chairman of the openSUSE board, you joined a community of people who work as a team.
As you well know, I was part of that community long before my involvement in it's Board, as both an elected member and then it's Chairman.
I feel your dismissal of that undermines your points below regarding our guiding principles, especially those relating to "respect for others and their work"
I'm glad you got my point. Doesn't feel too good to get talked to in such a dismissive tone, doesn't it? Maybe you shouldn't think about that only on the receiving end...
And I believe throughout this thread I have shown a repeated effort to listen and understand.
I fear, this got lost, for me at least, when you keep repeating in your emails that everything will turn into a "reality drama", "childish popularity contest" and that "the Board's ability to function in the roles it exists for will be grossly undermined", if "many of your views ... gained acceptance"
Maybe I'm a bit too sensitive. Everything you say afterward feels like the part of the sentence before the "but". I like you, but...
Of course there is significant amount of grey areas, and this discussion has most certainly helped evolve my position. I wouldn't describe my current views as simple black and white
Awesome, let's talk about that!
"I have no problem with the diversity of thought among the Board being public knowledge, but I do have a problem when that transitions from sharing the fact the board contains more than one opinion, to Board members publicly undermining the decision made by the collective whole group."
So how do you imagine board members can make their diverse thoughts public knowledge without undermining the decision made by the collective? Of the recent example, what would you wish would have been done differently?
"As a Board we could share both the majority and minority views on any decisions."
Sounds good. How do you imagine this would look like? Just the votes or a written "minority report" that summarizes the discussion? I guess this could turn into much work for you peepz. Previous boards had public meetings where you could listen in or see a log and see how a decision was reached, that would be one way to know what's going on.
"I'm happy to take from this lesson the collective decision that the Board will make less decisions and I will support any effort in the Board to push back from requests for it to make decisions and instead encourage more public debate and public decision making."
Which are the recent decisions you think you should have pushed back? How many percent do you guess would get off your plate?
And another thought, don't you think that defining the boards body of work so narrow on conflict resolution would take something away from the project? I mean yes if there are "existing governance structures" everything is fine and dandy but what if there aren't? Or are there no such decisions currently in your opinion?
Henne
On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 14:03, Henne Vogelsang hvogel@opensuse.org wrote:
Maybe I'm a bit too sensitive. Everything you say afterward feels like the part of the sentence before the "but". I like you, but...
Maybe you are, but we're talking it out, and I think that's a good thing.
I would rather you have seen everything "afterward" as a sincere effort on my part to express the nuance and detail I feel on the topic. Like you say, this is a topic with lots of grey, so even when I express a strong feeling on the topic there SHOULD be some 'but' to counter-balance and contextualise my view.
"I have no problem with the diversity of thought among the Board being public knowledge, but I do have a problem when that transitions from sharing the fact the board contains more than one opinion, to Board members publicly undermining the decision made by the collective whole group."
So how do you imagine board members can make their diverse thoughts public knowledge without undermining the decision made by the collective? Of the recent example, what would you wish would have been done differently?
In an ideal world, in retrospect, I would have liked the minutes of the meeting to reflect the Board as a whole.
Something along the lines of "The Board decided agree to the sponsorship request, but there were opposing views."
"As a Board we could share both the majority and minority views on any decisions."
Sounds good. How do you imagine this would look like? Just the votes or a written "minority report" that summarizes the discussion? I guess this could turn into much work for you peepz. Previous boards had public meetings where you could listen in or see a log and see how a decision was reached, that would be one way to know what's going on.
We've done minutes before where we included a summary of the debate, sometimes minuting the debate even when no conclusion came out of it. (eg. https://en.opensuse.org/Archive:Board_meeting_2018-07-17)
I'd be much happier with seeing the minutes cover not only the decision and a summary of the logic that led the majority to such a decision, but also a summary of the logic that led to any minority wishing for a counter decision.
I think that would be a really good thing to see for those few cases where the Board is not unanimous in a decision.
In the absence of such minutes, I'd also be happy with Board members sharing details of any debate or dissent from within the Board, but again, in the same vein as we would include in the minutes.
Eg. When the topic of sponsorship of the football team came up, any Board member could and perhaps should have felt free to share the fact that the decision was not unanimous and could have even gone so far to describe the opposing views.
This is something I've done myself from time to time. There has been times I've announced Board decisions with the -project that I wholeheartedly disagree with, and there has also been separates times I've shared details of how not everyone in the Board agreed with a decision which I personally voted for.
We, the Board, have a collective responsibility to the Project, and we, the Board, should do a good job of detailing what we, the Board thought about any decision we made on behalf of the Project.
But it should be _we_, the Board, not Richard, Ana, Gertjan, Sarah, Christian, and Simon as individuals. We need to work together as a team.
This is what I mean by collective 'ownership ' of both the decision and dissent.
This is especially important because of the nature of the decisions we make often being ugly ones.
"I'm happy to take from this lesson the collective decision that the Board will make less decisions and I will support any effort in the Board to push back from requests for it to make decisions and instead encourage more public debate and public decision making."
Which are the recent decisions you think you should have pushed back? How many percent do you guess would get off your plate?
https://en.opensuse.org/Archive:Board_meeting_2018-06-05 - Membership; I think the changes to the Membership scheme should be more thoroughly discussed by the Project - Conference committee , news.opensuse.org license , projects and events sponsored by openSUSE are all good examples of the Board pushing back things the Board shouldn't be dealing with. - oSC might be another example of the Board sticking its nose in to a topic further than it should, though ultimately we made no decision there, so you could justify it under the Board's gudiance role.
I think this sponsorship one COULD have been something which, instead of being escalated to the Board from the marketing team could have instead, possibly, been discussed here. Such an idea would require consent of the parties involved, which I am currently unsure of, but in retrospect I think I would have preferred dealing with the awkwardness of investigating that, rather than this existential crisis ;)
And another thought, don't you think that defining the boards body of work so narrow on conflict resolution would take something away from the project? I mean yes if there are "existing governance structures" everything is fine and dandy but what if there aren't? Or are there no such decisions currently in your opinion?
Conflict resolution has most certainly been the primary topic of the majority of Board meetings since the last election, yes.
I think we (as a whole collective Project) fallen into a bit of a trap of leaning on the Board's ability to be decision makers of last resort a little too often
I'm hopeful that this now epic debate has two outcomes. I hope it encourages more cases of more contributors taking more initiative and use this -project mailing-list to propose, decide, and do more things in the interest to the Project.
And I'm hopeful that it encourages the Board to continue to push back from deciding on things which it really shouldn't.
While I described the examples above as "push back", you could equally argue is the Board acting in it's role of guidance, support, and facilitating decision making processes - they are decisions which the Board or others have raised for the Board to decide, but really they are topics which _the Project_ should decide.
I think it's healthy for the Project that the Board isn't on a power trip and isn't grabbing every opportunity it can to decide on anything on behalf of the Project.
And I think encouraging that to continue is a role the Board should really push at every opportunity. Not just because it gives the Board less work, but because we're a Project which rises or falls on the _actions_ of our contributors, not the _decisions_ of our Board
El mar., 4 sept. 2018 a las 14:03, Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org) escribió:
Sounds good. How do you imagine this would look like? Just the votes or a written "minority report" that summarizes the discussion? I guess this could turn into much work for you peepz. Previous boards had public meetings where you could listen in or see a log and see how a decision was reached, that would be one way to know what's going on.
That's really interesting. Does this mean that previously the board meetings were completely open and everybody could join? How this exactly worked? Was there any information that could not be completely open discussed? In that case, what kind of things and how this worked with the open meetings? Do you (or someone else) have any clue why this changed?
Regards,
Ana -- Ana María Martínez Gómez https://anamaria.martinezgomez.name
On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 15:07, Ana Martínez anamma06@gmail.com wrote:
El mar., 4 sept. 2018 a las 14:03, Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org) escribió:
Sounds good. How do you imagine this would look like? Just the votes or a written "minority report" that summarizes the discussion? I guess this could turn into much work for you peepz. Previous boards had public meetings where you could listen in or see a log and see how a decision was reached, that would be one way to know what's going on.
That's really interesting. Does this mean that previously the board meetings were completely open and everybody could join? How this exactly worked? Was there any information that could not be completely open discussed? In that case, what kind of things and how this worked with the open meetings? Do you (or someone else) have any clue why this changed?
My understanding is that we never had public BOARD meetings - at least we never have since I was involved in any openSUSE Board, which has always had bi-weekly conference calls and an annual face to face meeting.
But we did have public PROJECT meetings, organised by the Board, where anyone in the Project could raise anything and discuss anything, much as we still do asynchronously in this list. At openSUSE Conferences we'd also have one of those meetings jointly in IRC and in the room, often as the closing session.
The Board stopped organising these IRC meetings after many months of the Board being the only attendees and there being no agenda items proposed. We kept the oSC closing Q&A tradition though.
Op dinsdag 4 september 2018 10:13:08 CEST schreef Per Jessen:
Jim Henderson wrote:
Richard, you know that I trust the board. But that said, there's a question of accountability - "trust, but verify" is important for the membership to know that the board is doing what they were elected to do.
In order to make an informed decision when someone runs for a second term on the board, how is anyone to know that the person they're voting for is representing their interests if the decisions they make (or votes they cast) aren't open to public review?
Eh, so far only Henne, Kostas and yours truely were re-elected. Where I happen to know Kostas ran for a second term mainly because no other candidates stood up for election.
Thanks for putting it so succinctly, that's exactly what I tried to say a few days back.
I agree with Richard that the board is an entity and should operate as a team. Read the Board rules / wiki etc. once again and the whole setup is like that. Which for me doesn't limit me in having personal opinions about matters at all. I also agree that the Board should be the ultimate point of resort when it comes to conflict resolution, decisions that can be made fine without the board's interference. Like most of you I do support transparency, but I object to total transparency. Strongly. I've seen the results of such a couple of years ago, and one of the results was the public virtual lynching of a couple of people involved. What was mentioned in public cannot be unmentioned. Sensitive info IMNSHO should stay private. Another thing that comes to mind when voting is public, is that ( also from experience ) there's a fair chance that the community will not discuss board decicions, but the voting behaviour of it's individual members. A more technical thing is that a result will be that on every board meeting one of the members can hardly join the discussion since full minutes require someone only doing that. Re. the public meetings: I do remember those, but they were IRC only.
Then again, I'm full of confidence that we, board and community, will find some balance here. The Board already started paying extra attention to the minutes, make sure they're published after each meeting, and some of us took part in the discussion here. Which IMO is a healthy discussion.
Hey,
On 04.09.2018 14:59, Richard Brown wrote:
On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 14:03, Henne Vogelsang hvogel@opensuse.org wrote:
Maybe I'm a bit too sensitive. Everything you say afterward feels like the part of the sentence before the "but". I like you, but...
Maybe you are, but we're talking it out, and I think that's a good thing.
I would rather you have seen everything "afterward" as a sincere effort
Sure that would have been ideal. Yet, just from my personal experience, it is seldom the case that people remember the things before the 'but'...
In an ideal world, in retrospect, I would have liked the minutes of the meeting to reflect the Board as a whole.
Something along the lines of "The Board decided agree to the sponsorship request, but there were opposing views." [...] I'd be much happier with seeing the minutes cover not only the decision and a summary of the logic that led the majority to such a decision, but also a summary of the logic that led to any minority wishing for a counter decision.
I think that would be a really good thing to see for those few cases where the Board is not unanimous in a decision.
Yes I also think this would be really good.
We, the Board, have a collective responsibility to the Project, and we, the Board, should do a good job of detailing what we, the Board thought about any decision we made on behalf of the Project.
But it should be _we_, the Board, not Richard, Ana, Gertjan, Sarah, Christian, and Simon as individuals. We need to work together as a team.
So that description of the two "logics" in the minutes would not include the names people who follow it because you think it is not team-work if one of that individuals has a different _public_ opinion while supporting the decision of the majority?
Isn't that the definition of team, supporting each other even in case of hard times (like disagreement)? I, as a non board member, wouldn't conceive hiding this as anything other than obfuscation of facts. And weak team behavior.
And what about the teamwork between the board and the rest of the community? Aren't we also a team? Or are we outside, not to be trusted to understand and differentiate between you as individuals and the majorities you form?
This is especially important because of the nature of the decisions we make often being ugly ones.
Ugly decisions, like you have described canceling membership or conflict resolution, often need a different approach for sure. Some situations call for unanimous and swift decisions that leave little room for debate. Everybody is aware of that I guess.
What I really don't understand, help me out please, is what stops you from deploying the appropriate individual measure to two complete different problems? Canceling membership versus voting on sponsorship for a football team. Why can't you come out with force in the former and explain to the rest of us what's going on to the fullest extent in the latter?
Now to construct an even more evil situation. What measure would you deploy if you cancel a membership when you are the only one voting for it (with your veto) or a 50:50 split of votes?
"I'm happy to take from this lesson the collective decision that the Board will make less decisions and I will support any effort in the Board to push back from requests for it to make decisions and instead encourage more public debate and public decision making."
Which are the recent decisions you think you should have pushed back? How many percent do you guess would get off your plate?
https://en.opensuse.org/Archive:Board_meeting_2018-06-05 [...]
Thank you for the list of things, it really helps to understand your point. I agree that most of these should not be concerns of the board. The question is why are they and why do people think they should be?
And another thought, don't you think that defining the boards body of work so narrow on conflict resolution would take something away from the project?
Conflict resolution has most certainly been the primary topic of the majority of Board meetings since the last election, yes.
I guess there is no debate about that. Does it have to be though?
I'm hopeful that this now epic debate has two outcomes.
My hope would be that the board sees this as a signal that the board needs to do something about facilitating decision making processes. Facilitating means helping the people who should decide to decide. It doesn't mean deciding for them.
Project which rises or falls on the _actions_ of our contributors, not the _decisions_ of our Board
Au contraire. We rise and fall on the _actions_ of all contributors, _including_ the board :-)
Henne
Hey,
On 04.09.2018 15:07, Ana Martínez wrote:
El mar., 4 sept. 2018 a las 14:03, Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org) escribió:
Sounds good. How do you imagine this would look like? Just the votes or a written "minority report" that summarizes the discussion? I guess this could turn into much work for you peepz. Previous boards had public meetings where you could listen in or see a log and see how a decision was reached, that would be one way to know what's going on.
That's really interesting. Does this mean that previously the board meetings were completely open and everybody could join? How this exactly worked?
Yes we had public IRC meetings. First two, one Board meeting and one Project meeting. Later, because it was a bit much and we couldn't generate enough interest, they melted into one project meeting. At some point in time this also got dropped because we as a project couldn't generate enough interest for it anymore.
Was there any information that could not be completely open discussed? In that case, what kind of things and how this worked with the open meetings?
We simply had a subsequent private meeting in another invite only channel. Where we would talk about things that we rather not discuss with everybody.
Henne
We, the Board, have a collective responsibility to the Project, and we, the Board, should do a good job of detailing what we, the Board thought about any decision we made on behalf of the Project.
But it should be _we_, the Board, not Richard, Ana, Gertjan, Sarah, Christian, and Simon as individuals. We need to work together as a team.
So that description of the two "logics" in the minutes would not include the names people who follow it because you think it is not team-work if one of that individuals has a different _public_ opinion while supporting the decision of the majority?
Yes, it would not include the names of either the people agreeing nor disagreeing with the final decision of the Board
Isn't that the definition of team, supporting each other even in case of hard times (like disagreement)? I, as a non board member, wouldn't conceive hiding this as anything other than obfuscation of facts. And weak team behavior.
And what about the teamwork between the board and the rest of the community? Aren't we also a team? Or are we outside, not to be trusted to understand and differentiate between you as individuals and the majorities you form?
The Board should only be making decisions when there are complex factors with nuance and discretion, with details which we cannot share publicly. So yes, I do not expect the community at large to be able to understand and differentiate in such circumstances. They will not be equipped with all of the information to do so. So they'll be judging the decisions of the individuals with half the information available. And if we could share all of the details with the Project in the first place, then I continue to argue that the Board shouldn't be deciding in those cases, so the question as to whether or not the votes should be public are somewhat defunct.
As an aside - I'd like to point out that so far all votes by the openSUSE membership has been private, and great care has been taken to ensure that this is always the case and we only use tools that support that workflow.
Are you advocating for making any and all Membership votes also public? In Board elections are Board members not to be trusted we knowing who voted for us? Shouldn't other Members know who voted for whom? In other elections are our fellow Members not to be trusted in knowing who voted for the latest guiding principles and such?
To quote Men in Black "A person is smart. People are dumb and panicky [...] and you know it".
This is especially important because of the nature of the decisions we make often being ugly ones.
Ugly decisions, like you have described canceling membership or conflict resolution, often need a different approach for sure. Some situations call for unanimous and swift decisions that leave little room for debate. Everybody is aware of that I guess.
What I really don't understand, help me out please, is what stops you from deploying the appropriate individual measure to two complete different problems? Canceling membership versus voting on sponsorship for a football team. Why can't you come out with force in the former and explain to the rest of us what's going on to the fullest extent in the latter?
Because, like I have illuded to, I do not feel comfortable about sharing all of the details of a situation which was escalated to the Board privately by others elsewhere in the Project, and so I'm treating the details of that request with the same discretion as I treat the other discreet requests made of the Board.
We always minute as much as we can, but I'd be uncomfortable betraying the trust of the escalating contributor by sharing all of the details without agreeing with them first.
Or to put it another way - given the typical purposes of the Board, I think it makes sense for the default setting to be discretion and privacy.
If there are cases where the Board is dealing with something that could be dealt with with the kind of openness you're advocating, then I would argue that is something that shouldn't be discussed at the Board level and instead should be discussed in an open venue, like this or any other openSUSE mailinglist.
Now to construct an even more evil situation. What measure would you deploy if you cancel a membership when you are the only one voting for it (with your veto) or a 50:50 split of votes?
We've had a 50:50 split of votes on such debates before - these decisions remained deadlocked until a clearer majority developed. It wasn't pretty, but there is no comfortable option in a Board of 6 people with each member having an equal vote.
I have never executed my power of veto. I would expect any execution of my veto to by VERY clearly minuted. As Chairman I expect absolutely zero privacy for any such cases.
In a case of the Chairman's veto overruling the majority of the Board, I would expect (and strongly encourage) that the Board use their power to request SUSE replace me as Chairman.
Which are the recent decisions you think you should have pushed back? How many percent do you guess would get off your plate?
https://en.opensuse.org/Archive:Board_meeting_2018-06-05 [...]
Thank you for the list of things, it really helps to understand your point. I agree that most of these should not be concerns of the board. The question is why are they and why do people think they should be?
I have a few speculative theories.
Because people have gotten into the habit of emailing board@opensuse.org instead of opensuse-project@opensuse.org?
Because Board members are human and have developed the habit of raising their bright ideas in the context of Board meetings instead of opensuse-project@opensuse.org instead of other lists?
It's a double edged sword - I think it's a good thing we've got active Boards full of inspired and inspiring individuals, it does help get the jobs done the Board is meant to do.
But the Board has always been documented in a way that made obvious that there is a risk of overreaching it's scope and in doing so risks impeding individuals from the Project to drive things forward in the way they should be able to.
I'm quite happy for this debate because at the very least it gives any brave soul who's read this far a chance to consider the views on this topic, and wherever they may lie on the spectrum of feeling on the topic, if they feel something, I think the Project will benefit.
And another thought, don't you think that defining the boards body of work so narrow on conflict resolution would take something away from the project?
Conflict resolution has most certainly been the primary topic of the majority of Board meetings since the last election, yes.
I guess there is no debate about that. Does it have to be though?
There is no one else to deal with conflict resolution, and similar discreet escalations, but there are other people (the community-at-large) to deal with other stuff.
Given that, and taking into account our shared view that if we look at most recent examples of what is put on the Board's plate that "should not be concerns of the Board" then I think yes, it should be that way.
The Board should limit itself to just doing stuff which no one else can do. For everything else, there's Mastercard..um.. I mean the mailinglists, forums, IRC, discord, etc, and the thousands of contributors who inhabit the Project on those platforms.
Though I'm open to any suggestions of what you think the Board should be doing besides dealing with such escalations - hey, that's why we publish the minutes! :)
Project which rises or falls on the _actions_ of our contributors, not the _decisions_ of our Board
Au contraire. We rise and fall on the _actions_ of all contributors, _including_ the board :-)
Touche ;)
Purple with pink spots!
I am completely confused as to what on earth is going on here. Trying to play catch-up on this thread after being on holiday and various travel, my immediate comment is WTF! Since when are we *expected* to express personal opinions?
As a previously elected member of the Board I can say, as Vincent has previously mentioned, the current Board is by far one of the most transparent. I genuinely am at a loss for words at the fact that pitch forks are being sharpened because personal opinions haven't been shared. As with all bikeshedding the thread has been derailed over minutiae that have almost no bearing on the topic. There's nothing wrong with disagreeing, in fact it's healthy; the problem to me is that we're not being constructive.
Is it too much to ask that people take a break, have a drink of something wholesome, relax a little and then continue having fun? This sort of hysteria is not productive and most certainly isn't helpful in having fun or anything else.
On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 15:11, Henne Vogelsang hvogel@opensuse.org wrote:
Hey,
On 04.09.2018 15:07, Ana Martínez wrote:
El mar., 4 sept. 2018 a las 14:03, Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org) escribió:
Sounds good. How do you imagine this would look like? Just the votes or a written "minority report" that summarizes the discussion? I guess this could turn into much work for you peepz. Previous boards had public meetings where you could listen in or see a log and see how a decision was reached, that would be one way to know what's going on.
That's really interesting. Does this mean that previously the board meetings were completely open and everybody could join? How this exactly worked?
Yes we had public IRC meetings. First two, one Board meeting and one Project meeting. Later, because it was a bit much and we couldn't generate enough interest, they melted into one project meeting. At some point in time this also got dropped because we as a project couldn't generate enough interest for it anymore.
Was there any information that could not be completely open discussed? In that case, what kind of things and how this worked with the open meetings?
We simply had a subsequent private meeting in another invite only channel. Where we would talk about things that we rather not discuss with everybody.
Henne
-- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org
Op dinsdag 4 september 2018 16:57:58 CEST schreef Andrew Wafaa:
Purple with pink spots!
I am completely confused as to what on earth is going on here. Trying to play catch-up on this thread after being on holiday and various travel, my immediate comment is WTF! Since when are we *expected* to express personal opinions?
As a previously elected member of the Board I can say, as Vincent has previously mentioned, the current Board is by far one of the most transparent. I genuinely am at a loss for words at the fact that pitch forks are being sharpened because personal opinions haven't been shared. As with all bikeshedding the thread has been derailed over minutiae that have almost no bearing on the topic. There's nothing wrong with disagreeing, in fact it's healthy; the problem to me is that we're not being constructive.
Is it too much to ask that people take a break, have a drink of something wholesome, relax a little and then continue having fun? This sort of hysteria is not productive and most certainly isn't helpful in having fun or anything else.
Thanks for stepping in, Andrew. I was writing a "Can we please ..." email, this one's much better, it's how I feel exactly.
On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 15:11, Henne Vogelsang hvogel@opensuse.org wrote:
Hey,
On 04.09.2018 15:07, Ana Martínez wrote:
El mar., 4 sept. 2018 a las 14:03, Henne Vogelsang
(hvogel@opensuse.org) escribió:
Sounds good. How do you imagine this would look like? Just the votes or a written "minority report" that summarizes the discussion? I guess this could turn into much work for you peepz. Previous boards had public meetings where you could listen in or see a log and see how a decision was reached, that would be one way to know what's going on.
That's really interesting. Does this mean that previously the board meetings were completely open and everybody could join? How this exactly worked?
Yes we had public IRC meetings. First two, one Board meeting and one Project meeting. Later, because it was a bit much and we couldn't generate enough interest, they melted into one project meeting. At some point in time this also got dropped because we as a project couldn't generate enough interest for it anymore.
Was there any information that could not be completely open discussed? In that case, what kind of things and how this worked with the open meetings?
We simply had a subsequent private meeting in another invite only channel. Where we would talk about things that we rather not discuss with everybody.
Henne
-- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit.
- Mike Tyson-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org
El mar., 4 sept. 2018 a las 17:21, Knurpht-openSUSE (knurpht@opensuse.org) escribió:
Op dinsdag 4 september 2018 16:57:58 CEST schreef Andrew Wafaa:
Purple with pink spots!
I am completely confused as to what on earth is going on here. Trying to play catch-up on this thread after being on holiday and various travel, my immediate comment is WTF! Since when are we *expected* to express personal opinions?
As a previously elected member of the Board I can say, as Vincent has previously mentioned, the current Board is by far one of the most transparent. I genuinely am at a loss for words at the fact that pitch forks are being sharpened because personal opinions haven't been shared. As with all bikeshedding the thread has been derailed over minutiae that have almost no bearing on the topic. There's nothing wrong with disagreeing, in fact it's healthy; the problem to me is that we're not being constructive.
Is it too much to ask that people take a break, have a drink of something wholesome, relax a little and then continue having fun? This sort of hysteria is not productive and most certainly isn't helpful in having fun or anything else.
Thanks for stepping in, Andrew. I was writing a "Can we please ..." email, this one's much better, it's how I feel exactly.
+1
Andrew Wafaa wrote:
Purple with pink spots!
I am completely confused as to what on earth is going on here. Trying to play catch-up on this thread after being on holiday and various travel, my immediate comment is WTF! Since when are we *expected* to express personal opinions?
Isn't that the whole reason someone offers to and is elected for board membership? His or her person?
I genuinely am at a loss for words at the fact that pitch forks are being sharpened because personal opinions haven't been shared.
Umm, in my understanding this thread is about whether it should be expected/permitted/encouraged for board members to share their votes with the community. To enable "trust is good, control is better".
As with all bikeshedding the thread has been derailed over minutiae that have almost no bearing on the topic. There's nothing wrong with disagreeing, in fact it's healthy; the problem to me is that we're not being constructive.
Proposal - add something like this to our guidelines -
* an active board member is encouraged to share his or her vote on any topic with the community whenever he or she feels it is appropriate or desirable. In particular when asked to do so by the community.
On Tue, 04 Sep 2018 10:24:48 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
On Sun, 2 Sep 2018 at 22:47, Jim Henderson hendersj@gmail.com wrote:
Richard, you know that I trust the board. But that said, there's a question of accountability - "trust, but verify" is important for the membership to know that the board is doing what they were elected to do.
In order to make an informed decision when someone runs for a second term on the board, how is anyone to know that the person they're voting for is representing their interests if the decisions they make (or votes they cast) aren't open to public review?
The same information that you had and have to vote on any other Board member candidate in the project.
That information is incomplete, but the best information we have.
It's like a thing I've seen some companies do when hiring candidates: They have a cognitive abilities test (the CCAT is one I've seen) - it's no substitute for looking at actual performance data on the individual if that's available, but when you're hiring someone who's external, you don't get neutral performance data on the individual, so you have to use data from a test that's been designed to be a good predictor of future performance without covering past performance. But nearly anyone who works in recruiting will tell you that, if possible, actual performance data is a better predictor and far preferred.
When someone runs for a board position as a new candidate, you don't have a voting record to use as a part of evaluating them. You can only go on their promises for what they will do as a board member, and what you've seen from them in non-board-member roles.
Actually showing what you did, though, as a member of the board? That lets us draw a "you promised this, and you delivered on it" or "you promised this, and you didn't deliver on it".
That's fairly important when it comes to re-election campaigns. The members' voting record is crucial data for an electorate. Candidates run on their record, when they have one. But you can only do that if the record is public.
Board Membership should not be the sole contribution that any individual makes to the Project
True. But their contribution as a developer isn't the same kind of contribution as someone in a position that's involved in project governance.
Their should be plenty of other examples regarding existing Board members opinions, work ethic, and other factors to help anyone assist where to put their votes, just as their is for when voting for new Board members.
See above. :)
We have our strict 2 term limit for many reasons, but I understand one of them was the assumption that the Board will be voting in private.
While talking about such rules, it's also worth pointing out the Project's right to recall a Board.
There is no provision in our rules for the Project to call for the resignation or removal of a single Board member.
Which is perhaps problematic, but also maybe a separate discussion.
But there IS a provision for the entire Board to be re-elected. The threshold for this is currently if 20% of the Membership call for it. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_rules
This rule and the very low threshold for recall only makes sense BECAUSE of the expectation that the Board will be making decisions as a collective. Otherwise it would be madness to have such a rule constituted in a way.
If we are seriously thinking about forcing the Board to publish the exact votes of each individual member, then I think we need a full review of all our entire constitution and ruleset.
Not a bad idea - as times change, it might be worth having a periodic review to see if those items still reflect the goal and will of the project and its membership.
I feel the ability for the Project to individually call for the removal of a specific Board member would be one rule that must be added in such a case.
And I would argue that the rule for the entire Board to be re-elected if 20% of the Membership call for it should be altered, either with a much higher threshold, or removed entirely.
Well, the latter would follow from the former - logically, if 20% of the membership could call for the removal of a specific board member, there's no reason they couldn't remove all the members individually.
Jim
On Tue, 04 Sep 2018 15:40:29 +0200, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
Sensitive info IMNSHO should stay private.
And nobody is advocating for changing that, at least that I've seen. I've specifically said that when there are third party privacy concerns involved, it's appropriate for the details to stay private.
Another thing that comes to mind when voting is public, is that ( also from experience ) there's a fair chance that the community will not discuss board decicions, but the voting behaviour of it's individual members.
Which is fine. If the community doesn't feel like a member of the board is properly representing their interests or delivering on their campaign promises or stated goals for running for the board, that would seem to be a fair discussion for the community to have, no?
Like I said, default to being open, except for cases where not being open is specifically warranted (and can be noted in the notes - like "discussed dismissal of problematic member of the project; voted and decided to take action. Specific information withheld for third party privacy reasons."
As I said, we see this in LKML on occasion - with the Spectre and Meltdown exploits is the most obvious example. That group defaults to being open with their information except when they can't due to third party privacy reasons (Intel's in those instances) or to follow responsible disclosure policies.
But the policy doesn't prohibit Linus calling another developer a moron for doing something that he (Linus) feels was a stupid thing to do and calling attention to bad decisions made by developers on the team.
What's more, while that does make the press when it happens, it doesn't break the development process. The argument has been made that that policy has made for a stronger kernel, not a weaker one.
I would argue that the same thing is true here - having the board be open about the things that they vote on makes the board stronger, not weaker.
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.
Jim
On Tue, 04 Sep 2018 13:13:48 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
I agree with your principle. My point is, the Board should only be deciding on topics where there is a good reason not to make it public.
What was the good reason for the board to decide on the football team and not to make it public?
Because, unlike the vast amount of other sponsorships which the Project decides upon without the Board's direct involvement, the unusual nature of this one led to the marketing team (who normally decide on sponsorships) asking the Board for our opinion.
It seems the appropriate response in this instance would have been (and yes, this is with 20/20 hindsight) "That's a good question for the project membership, let's ask them". :)
On 04/09/2018 20:23, Ana Martínez wrote:
El mar., 4 sept. 2018 a las 10:04, Richard Brown (RBrownCCB@opensuse.org) escribió:
On Sun, 2 Sep 2018 at 19:49, Ana Martínez anamma06@gmail.com wrote:
When you joined the Board, you joined a decision making body that works as a Team. I expect any team member to support the decisions made of that team. Equally, I expect a well rounded team to also be supportive and open with dissent and complexity in their decision-making.
In our Wiki page[1] does not say anything about supporting decisions a board member don't agree with. But it does say that the board should document decisions and policies. When things are not documented neither discussed, it is normal that your expectations and mines are different.
After that many answers in this email thread I think the board should discuss in the next meeting if we should make public who voted what (I'll ensure this happens).
I think it would be grossly inappropriate for the Board to discuss in private something we have collectively proven to be able to discuss in public.
The fact that we're still having this conversation here means that any move to discuss this in the Board tonight would seem to be to be both hypocritical in the goal for more transparency, and the view that the Board meetings should be focused on topics which cannot be discussed openly. Therefore I will be objecting to any suggestion that we discuss this at tonight's meeting.
I object to not discuss it. 💔
From this thread I get that:
- Community wants the votes to be public
- I want them to be public
- You want them to be private
- I am not sure what the other board members want
I would like to know what the others in the board think. More information is always a good thing. 😍
I'd be happy with doing it on a "case by case basis" but i'd expect that given the vast majority of things we have to vote on we would mostly keep it private. I think there are exceptional circumstances where it likely should be private, such as if the board was to remove one of its members or request a new chairman I think the community deserves to fully know why. Personally if we are not making the entire circumstances around the vote public then I do not want the vote to be public similarly if anyone on the board raises an objection to a vote being public for some reason i'd expect the board to keep the result private.
Should the board decide to vote on this topic and 3 members want private votes always i'd respect that and also vote for it to be private so its not a 3-3 split.
In reality what some people in this thread need to understand is that you elect the board to deal with complex tricky issues that are not well suited to being dealt with by the community as a whole as such alot of the detail often remains private so the project doesn't need to go through crazy mailing list threads and member votes on every issue. I think that if every board vote becomes public then every remotely controversial discussion is going to come out on the mailing list and then there is really very little point in having an openSUSE board in its current form.
Hey,
On 04.09.2018 16:44, Richard Brown wrote:
To quote Men in Black "A person is smart. People are dumb and panicky [...] and you know it".
Phew okay, I guess I'm done with this conversation...
Hewnne
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:
Another thing that comes to mind when voting is public, is that ( also from experience ) there's a fair chance that the community will not discuss board decicions, but the voting behaviour of it's individual members.
Which is fine. If the community doesn't feel like a member of the board is properly representing their interests or delivering on their campaign promises or stated goals for running for the board, that would seem to be a fair discussion for the community to have, no?
That's a tricky question - whatever I answer will paint me into a corner ;-)
You _and_ Gertjan have good arguments, but sadly we can't have both ways at the same time. Maybe my answer below will at least ensure that I paint myself into the green corner ;-)
Like I said, default to being open, except for cases where not being open is specifically warranted (and can be noted in the notes - like "discussed dismissal of problematic member of the project; voted and decided to take action. Specific information withheld for third party privacy reasons."
As I said, we see this in LKML on occasion - with the Spectre and Meltdown exploits is the most obvious example. That group defaults to being open with their information except when they can't due to third party privacy reasons (Intel's in those instances) or to follow responsible disclosure policies.
There's a "little" difference between keeping technical issues private vs. keeping board topics/discussions which often involve humans private. (Hint: The reason for keeping the Spectre exploits/patches private is _not_ to protect the humans who designed the "broken" CPU.)
But the policy doesn't prohibit Linus calling another developer a moron for doing something that he (Linus) feels was a stupid thing to do and calling attention to bad decisions made by developers on the team.
I've only read a few of Linus' rants, but most of those I've read were beyond our guiding principles, so Linus might be at risk of receiving a formal warning if he ever posts such a rant on an openSUSE mailinglist ;-) Yes, I can imagine that lots of people, including the press, might have lots of fun reading such a warning, and the one sending it will probably end up in a funny[tm] shitstorm ;-)
Back to the topic: Complaining about bad code is of course [more than] ok, but it should be done without personal attacks ("this code is bad" vs. "you are an idiot")
What's more, while that does make the press when it happens, it doesn't break the development process. The argument has been made that that policy has made for a stronger kernel, not a weaker one.
I'm sure there are more friendly ways to reach that "better kernel" goal ;-)
I would argue that the same thing is true here - having the board be open about the things that they vote on makes the board stronger, not weaker.
I'll give you two answers on this ;-)
1) Personally, I don't have a problem with making my votes public, even if a specific vote might be unpopular or in hindsight turn out to be wrong.
2) The problem is that making my votes public also means you can guess (or even know, if I'm the "1" in a "5:1" vote) how the other board members voted. I understand the arguments of those board members who think that having the votes public would come with side effects (like voting for what people will like instead of what makes sense, or discussions about the voting behaviour while "ignoring" the board decision).
Making my own votes public would basically mean to make the votes of the other board members public, and I won't do that to the other board members unless they agree with making it public, or I think the other's votes were completely stupid ;-) (which, BTW, never happened yet)
For now, I'll do a similar offer as Simon already did - if you want to know how I voted on something, ask me in a private mail, and I'll probably answer ;-)
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.)
Of course you can always ask for more details to get a fuller picture [1], and we'll provide these details whenever possible - which also means that sometimes that won't be possible.
Damn, did I painted myself into the middle of the room now while carefully avoiding all corners? ;-) Since the topic is not clearly black or white, I'm not even surprised...
Regards,
Christian Boltz
[1] I'm intentionally not saying "the full picture" here, because that's not always as easy as it might sound.
This thread, and the debate about votes, actually moved -- in the most part -- to some reasonable suggestions pro and con.
Some exceptions, of course, such as the person's who have taken the stance of "I have made up my mind way ahead of time, and I will go to ridiculous lengths and absurd examples to defend my position, even though I refuse to give any open-minded thought to the debate."
Which, of course, is sad, especially when some of them are my personal "openSUSE Heroes".
However, as I said, the debate is taking some actual Adult, Thoughtful, Open-Minded direction, as well.
I especially thank Jim Henderson for stepping in hear, since he has some of the most Reasonable responses and suggestions to offer.
For the past several days, I have been planning to step back in -- since the thread improved -- and compose a Very Carefully Thought Out response to some of the points raised here.
In the meantime, Jim has stepped in and made pretty much all the Reasonable points I was planning to make.
I do not say it is "do or die, all votes must be made public".
But, there really has not been one single Reasonable and Realistic point raised to negate the move to defaulting to "Votes made public unless there is a good, valid reason not to."
Not one.
No, not ONE!
There are many things that absolutely *must* remain private. For a good example, the Board reporting in the Minutes that it was necessary to mediate between a couple of our valuable contributors, that was important information for us to know, but at the same time:
Not releasing the information about who voted for what, nor the details of the mediation, nor the information about Who the contributors are/were or what the issue is remained Private, as it should.
We now understand some of the difficult work our Board Members are doing for us as a result of the information as it was released, without the disruptive information being allowed to come out and cause harm.
I believe that the Board Members whom we have elected (and the appointed one, as well) can be thoroughly trusted to decide such things, and I believe most of the Community would agree we have that much Trust in our Board Members.
So, I think it is Imperative that the default should be:
* Make the Votes Public *unless there is a good, valid, reasonable reason NOT to, and;
* If a Member of the Board decided the votes on a certain issue should NOT be made public, they should raise their point to the other Board Members. The Board would then decide if it is a Reasonable objection, or not, and if the objection passes the "Reasonable" test, than the vote should not be made public.
Seems to me that would be an Adult, Principled, Reasonable approach.
... and, thanks again, Jim, for your well-expressed thoughts on this subject.
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:
Another thing that comes to mind when voting is public, is that ( also from experience ) there's a fair chance that the community will not discuss board decicions, but the voting behaviour of it's individual members.
Which is fine. If the community doesn't feel like a member of the board is properly representing their interests or delivering on their campaign promises or stated goals for running for the board, that would seem to be a fair discussion for the community to have, no?
That's a tricky question - whatever I answer will paint me into a corner ;-)
:)
You _and_ Gertjan have good arguments, but sadly we can't have both ways at the same time. Maybe my answer below will at least ensure that I paint myself into the green corner ;-)
Well, it seems to me that the board is asking the community to trust it - but I think trust needs to be a two-way street, and the board needs to trust the community as well.
There's a "little" difference between keeping technical issues private vs. keeping board topics/discussions which often involve humans private. (Hint: The reason for keeping the Spectre exploits/patches private is _not_ to protect the humans who designed the "broken" CPU.)
True, but my point remains - there was a good reason to keep those exploits secret while the updates were being worked on. Similarly, there are instances where it makes sense to keep a board vote private. But in both instances, defaulting to "open" is, in my mind, a totally valid reason.
But the policy doesn't prohibit Linus calling another developer a moron for doing something that he (Linus) feels was a stupid thing to do and calling attention to bad decisions made by developers on the team.
I've only read a few of Linus' rants, but most of those I've read were beyond our guiding principles, so Linus might be at risk of receiving a formal warning if he ever posts such a rant on an openSUSE mailinglist ;-) Yes, I can imagine that lots of people, including the press, might have lots of fun reading such a warning, and the one sending it will probably end up in a funny[tm] shitstorm ;-)
With all due respect to Gertjan (who is a fellow forums admin), his responses to Brian were in a similar vein to some of Linus' rants at other developers (perhaps a bit tamer), yet he doesn't seem to have been given any sort of formal warning here.
Back to the topic: Complaining about bad code is of course [more than] ok, but it should be done without personal attacks ("this code is bad" vs. "you are an idiot")
I don't fundamentally disagree with that assessment, but this is going down a rabbit hole that is steering away from the actual topic. I was providing that as an example of how to do "open with some limitations" properly - the specific details of how it's handled on LKML vis-a-vis Linus yelling at developers for doing "stupid" things is really beside the point.
I would argue that the same thing is true here - having the board be open about the things that they vote on makes the board stronger, not weaker.
I'll give you two answers on this ;-)
Personally, I don't have a problem with making my votes public, even if a specific vote might be unpopular or in hindsight turn out to be wrong.
Good. :) We're all human, and nobody should ever be afraid to be wrong. We all make mistakes, and we all screw up. If we don't, we're not taking risks and not having experiences that we can grow from.
The problem is that making my votes public also means you can guess (or even know, if I'm the "1" in a "5:1" vote) how the other board members voted. I understand the arguments of those board members who think that having the votes public would come with side effects (like voting for what people will like instead of what makes sense, or discussions about the voting behaviour while "ignoring" the board decision).
Which is why the board should be entirely on-board with being open when there's not a third-party privacy issue involved (the other point of the Spectre/Meltdown example - there was a third-party privacy issue involved - Intel's - and a responsible disclosure issue as well).
Making my own votes public would basically mean to make the votes of the other board members public, and I won't do that to the other board members unless they agree with making it public, or I think the other's votes were completely stupid ;-) (which, BTW, never happened yet)
That's fair. I would encourage you, as a member of the board, to promote this idea inside the board further.
For now, I'll do a similar offer as Simon already did - if you want to know how I voted on something, ask me in a private mail, and I'll probably answer ;-)
That's fair. :)
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.
Of course you can always ask for more details to get a fuller picture [1], and we'll provide these details whenever possible - which also means that sometimes that won't be possible.
Naturally. Depends on the topic, and I think most of us in the community understand that.
Damn, did I painted myself into the middle of the room now while carefully avoiding all corners? ;-) Since the topic is not clearly black or white, I'm not even surprised...
:D
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I've found this much more constructive than some of the other sub-discussions here.
Jim
On Wed, 05 Sep 2018 16:01:43 +0930, Simon Lees wrote:
In reality what some people in this thread need to understand is that you elect the board to deal with complex tricky issues that are not well suited to being dealt with by the community as a whole as such alot of the detail often remains private so the project doesn't need to go through crazy mailing list threads and member votes on every issue. I think that if every board vote becomes public then every remotely controversial discussion is going to come out on the mailing list and then there is really very little point in having an openSUSE board in its current form.
I for one do understand that, Simon - but I think the board also needs to understand that when it asks the membership to trust it, the board also needs to trust the membership, too - that trust is a two-way street.
One question that this paragraph raises for me - does a new board member have access to information about past decisions that have been made (ie, is there a set of private minutes) so there's continuity and history of why decisions were made within the board? Or is that information not recorded, and thus lost?
Jim
On 06/09/2018 06:52, Fraser_Bell wrote:
This thread, and the debate about votes, actually moved -- in the most part -- to some reasonable suggestions pro and con.
Some exceptions, of course, such as the person's who have taken the stance of "I have made up my mind way ahead of time, and I will go to ridiculous lengths and absurd examples to defend my position, even though I refuse to give any open-minded thought to the debate."
Which, of course, is sad, especially when some of them are my personal "openSUSE Heroes".
However, as I said, the debate is taking some actual Adult, Thoughtful, Open-Minded direction, as well.
I especially thank Jim Henderson for stepping in hear, since he has some of the most Reasonable responses and suggestions to offer.
For the past several days, I have been planning to step back in -- since the thread improved -- and compose a Very Carefully Thought Out response to some of the points raised here.
In the meantime, Jim has stepped in and made pretty much all the Reasonable points I was planning to make.
I do not say it is "do or die, all votes must be made public".
But, there really has not been one single Reasonable and Realistic point raised to negate the move to defaulting to "Votes made public unless there is a good, valid reason not to."
Not one.
No, not ONE!
There are many things that absolutely *must* remain private. For a good example, the Board reporting in the Minutes that it was necessary to mediate between a couple of our valuable contributors, that was important information for us to know, but at the same time:
Not releasing the information about who voted for what, nor the details of the mediation, nor the information about Who the contributors are/were or what the issue is remained Private, as it should.
We now understand some of the difficult work our Board Members are doing for us as a result of the information as it was released, without the disruptive information being allowed to come out and cause harm.
I believe that the Board Members whom we have elected (and the appointed one, as well) can be thoroughly trusted to decide such things, and I believe most of the Community would agree we have that much Trust in our Board Members.
So, I think it is Imperative that the default should be:
- Make the Votes Public *unless there is a good, valid, reasonable
reason NOT to, and;
- If a Member of the Board decided the votes on a certain issue should
NOT be made public, they should raise their point to the other Board Members. The Board would then decide if it is a Reasonable objection, or not, and if the objection passes the "Reasonable" test, than the vote should not be made public.
Seems to me that would be an Adult, Principled, Reasonable approach.
... and, thanks again, Jim, for your well-expressed thoughts on this subject.
Ok, so we are getting somewhere here, we mostly agree, so my reason for saying exactly what you are except with private by default is one of simplicity and practicality, on the vast majority of things that the board deals with we reach a consensus without a vote which really leaves us in the position where 90% of the things we vote on and don't reach a consensus have a good valid reasonable reason to keep the votes public, if a board member can't say why they voted for something because it would require making info public then they shouldn't have to say what they voted for.
On 06/09/2018 08:33, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Wed, 05 Sep 2018 16:01:43 +0930, Simon Lees wrote:
In reality what some people in this thread need to understand is that you elect the board to deal with complex tricky issues that are not well suited to being dealt with by the community as a whole as such alot of the detail often remains private so the project doesn't need to go through crazy mailing list threads and member votes on every issue. I think that if every board vote becomes public then every remotely controversial discussion is going to come out on the mailing list and then there is really very little point in having an openSUSE board in its current form.
I for one do understand that, Simon - but I think the board also needs to understand that when it asks the membership to trust it, the board also needs to trust the membership, too - that trust is a two-way street.
One question that this paragraph raises for me - does a new board member have access to information about past decisions that have been made (ie, is there a set of private minutes) so there's continuity and history of why decisions were made within the board? Or is that information not recorded, and thus lost?
This is one of the main reasons why Richard doesn't have a 2 year term, he has been around for long enough to remember most things, I think some previous boards have kept even less detailed minutes then we are at the moment and if we really want to know something we sometimes ask members of previous boards.
On 09/05/2018 04:10 PM, Simon Lees wrote:
Ok, so we are getting somewhere here, we mostly agree, so my reason for saying exactly what you are except with private by default is one of simplicity and practicality, on the vast majority of things that the board deals with we reach a consensus without a vote which really leaves us in the position where 90% of the things we vote on and don't reach a consensus have a good valid reasonable reason to keep the votes public,
if a board member can't say why they voted for something because it would require making info public then they shouldn't have to say what they voted for.
Absolutely on that last point, as long as you are referring to reasonably restricted info.
BTW: I personally have enjoyed your contribution to this discussion, as your comments and points of view have been made within reason.
+BTW: I vote yes LOL
Oh, and a very IMPORTANT BTW:
I personally want to thank Every One of you on the openSUSE Board:
* For the transparency that you already have achieved: STANDING OVATION here. Without it, this discussion would not be going on at all.
* For taking part in this discussion: We are learning more and more what the Board *ACTUALLY* does and what it does *NOT* do, something that has in the past seemed to be a much more guarded secret than how Cadbury *really* gets the caramel into the Caramilk bars.
It is definitely NOT at all what I thought the Board's function was, though I had a better understanding than some, I believe.
Op donderdag 6 september 2018 01:00:37 CEST schreef Jim Henderson:
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:
Another thing that comes to mind when voting is public, is that ( also from experience ) there's a fair chance that the community will not discuss board decicions, but the voting behaviour of it's individual members.
Which is fine. If the community doesn't feel like a member of the board is properly representing their interests or delivering on their campaign promises or stated goals for running for the board, that would seem to be a fair discussion for the community to have, no?
That's a tricky question - whatever I answer will paint me into a corner ;-)
: :) :
You _and_ Gertjan have good arguments, but sadly we can't have both ways at the same time. Maybe my answer below will at least ensure that I paint myself into the green corner ;-)
Well, it seems to me that the board is asking the community to trust it - but I think trust needs to be a two-way street, and the board needs to trust the community as well.
There's a "little" difference between keeping technical issues private vs. keeping board topics/discussions which often involve humans private. (Hint: The reason for keeping the Spectre exploits/patches private is _not_ to protect the humans who designed the "broken" CPU.)
True, but my point remains - there was a good reason to keep those exploits secret while the updates were being worked on. Similarly, there are instances where it makes sense to keep a board vote private. But in both instances, defaulting to "open" is, in my mind, a totally valid reason.
But the policy doesn't prohibit Linus calling another developer a moron for doing something that he (Linus) feels was a stupid thing to do and calling attention to bad decisions made by developers on the team.
I've only read a few of Linus' rants, but most of those I've read were beyond our guiding principles, so Linus might be at risk of receiving a formal warning if he ever posts such a rant on an openSUSE mailinglist ;-) Yes, I can imagine that lots of people, including the press, might have lots of fun reading such a warning, and the one sending it will probably end up in a funny[tm] shitstorm ;-)
With all due respect to Gertjan (who is a fellow forums admin), his responses to Brian were in a similar vein to some of Linus' rants at other developers (perhaps a bit tamer), yet he doesn't seem to have been given any sort of formal warning here.
I've already apologized for language used, and for an emotional reaction. I still regret having been harsh. Given that, I don't think Bryan would have like his actions made public, and yes, I did bring that up, in private as well as in the board. Where Bryan never brought up these things until his term was done, and that hurt.
Back to the topic: Complaining about bad code is of course [more than] ok, but it should be done without personal attacks ("this code is bad" vs. "you are an idiot")
I don't fundamentally disagree with that assessment, but this is going down a rabbit hole that is steering away from the actual topic. I was providing that as an example of how to do "open with some limitations" properly - the specific details of how it's handled on LKML vis-a-vis Linus yelling at developers for doing "stupid" things is really beside the point.
I would argue that the same thing is true here - having the board be open about the things that they vote on makes the board stronger, not weaker.
I'll give you two answers on this ;-)
Personally, I don't have a problem with making my votes public, even if a specific vote might be unpopular or in hindsight turn out to be wrong.
Good. :) We're all human, and nobody should ever be afraid to be wrong. We all make mistakes, and we all screw up. If we don't, we're not taking risks and not having experiences that we can grow from.
The problem is that making my votes public also means you can guess (or even know, if I'm the "1" in a "5:1" vote) how the other board members voted. I understand the arguments of those board members who think that having the votes public would come with side effects (like voting for what people will like instead of what makes sense, or discussions about the voting behaviour while "ignoring" the board decision).
Which is why the board should be entirely on-board with being open when there's not a third-party privacy issue involved (the other point of the Spectre/Meltdown example - there was a third-party privacy issue involved
- Intel's - and a responsible disclosure issue as well).
Making my own votes public would basically mean to make the votes of the other board members public, and I won't do that to the other board members unless they agree with making it public, or I think the other's votes were completely stupid ;-) (which, BTW, never happened yet)
That's fair. I would encourage you, as a member of the board, to promote this idea inside the board further.
For now, I'll do a similar offer as Simon already did - if you want to know how I voted on something, ask me in a private mail, and I'll probably answer ;-)
That's fair. :)
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.
Of course you can always ask for more details to get a fuller picture [1], and we'll provide these details whenever possible - which also means that sometimes that won't be possible.
Naturally. Depends on the topic, and I think most of us in the community understand that.
Damn, did I painted myself into the middle of the room now while carefully avoiding all corners? ;-) Since the topic is not clearly black or white, I'm not even surprised...
: :D
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I've found this much more constructive than some of the other sub-discussions here.
Jim
I'd like to mention some things here, from the thread: - The board has never been more transparent ( Vincent/Wafaa ) than currently. - One of the ongoing items in the board meetings ( with publishing regular minutes on the project ML ) actually is transparency. Do not expect us to be perfect in this matter. FWIW we decided NOT to discuss this ( thread ) in our yesterday BM, instead to keep it here, with us as individuals taking part. - What does sadden me: I've always felt that after standing up for board ( not my personal plan, but on community request ) I could count votes as a statement of trust in that I would work as a board member in the interest of the community. From this thread I get that doesn't fit. If I would have known I'd be out in the open "stark naked", I doubt I would have stepped up. Has it ever occurred to someone that as a board member my first priority is the community, not by personal desires / opinions? That this ( it hasn't, but still ) might influence my vote, having the knowledge as a board member now, but not before being elected? - Are we going to deal with all the other teams like this as well? I.e. Are the forums team going 100% transparent? Can all the mod area discussions be anonimized and publised? Same for the other teams? - FWIW: I'm all for transparency, but not just like that. The process the board has already started has to be dealt with very carefully, to make sure no one and nothing gets damaged. Like said before: seen too many occasions where this went wrong at the cost of people's reputations, personal life.
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.
Op donderdag 6 september 2018 01:03:45 CEST schreef Jim Henderson:
On Wed, 05 Sep 2018 16:01:43 +0930, Simon Lees wrote:
In reality what some people in this thread need to understand is that you elect the board to deal with complex tricky issues that are not well suited to being dealt with by the community as a whole as such alot of the detail often remains private so the project doesn't need to go through crazy mailing list threads and member votes on every issue. I think that if every board vote becomes public then every remotely controversial discussion is going to come out on the mailing list and then there is really very little point in having an openSUSE board in its current form.
I for one do understand that, Simon - but I think the board also needs to understand that when it asks the membership to trust it, the board also needs to trust the membership, too - that trust is a two-way street.
One question that this paragraph raises for me - does a new board member have access to information about past decisions that have been made (ie, is there a set of private minutes) so there's continuity and history of why decisions were made within the board? Or is that information not recorded, and thus lost?
Jim
IIRC Like in the forums, I had access to previous board data when starting as a board member. We have a closed ML, minutes have been published before, maybe not on the project ML. Whenever I asked for history I had no knowledge of, I was provided with proper information by the other board members.
Like I've writen in another post on this ML, the board is working on this, let the minutes here be an example. But, like any other team in the project we cannot just go for one suggestion and make that universal truth, we need time to find out what can go public and what can't, what the community consensus is , it's a learning process for us too. Please be aware that all of the board members are looking at / participating in this thread and expressing their own thoughts. That's transparency, isn't it ?
FWIW, one of the things I like about the openSUSE Project, the community, is that we can have these discussions. In the end we'll all benefit.
My 232432 cents.
On Thu, 06 Sep 2018 01:34:59 +0200, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
With all due respect to Gertjan (who is a fellow forums admin), his responses to Brian were in a similar vein to some of Linus' rants at other developers (perhaps a bit tamer), yet he doesn't seem to have been given any sort of formal warning here.
I've already apologized for language used, and for an emotional reaction. I still regret having been harsh. Given that, I don't think Bryan would have like his actions made public, and yes, I did bring that up, in private as well as in the board. Where Bryan never brought up these things until his term was done, and that hurt.
Right, and I saw your apology. I hope Brian did as well.
My point in raising your comments to Bryan wasn't to call you out; it was to point out that Christian's comments about Linus' behaviour on LKML perhaps not being tolerated on our lists is actually probably not accurate.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I've found this much more constructive than some of the other sub-discussions here.
I'd like to mention some things here, from the thread:
- The board has never been more transparent ( Vincent/Wafaa ) than
currently. - One of the ongoing items in the board meetings ( with publishing regular minutes on the project ML ) actually is transparency. Do not expect us to be perfect in this matter. FWIW we decided NOT to discuss this ( thread ) in our yesterday BM, instead to keep it here, with us as individuals taking part.
Yes, there is progress. But just because it's better now doesn't mean it can't still improve.
- What does sadden me: I've always felt that after standing up for board
( not my personal plan, but on community request ) I could count votes as a statement of trust in that I would work as a board member in the interest of the community. From this thread I get that doesn't fit. If I would have known I'd be out in the open "stark naked", I doubt I would have stepped up. Has it ever occurred to someone that as a board member my first priority is the community, not by personal desires / opinions? That this ( it hasn't, but still ) might influence my vote, having the knowledge as a board member now, but not before being elected?
As I said, trust is a two-way street. Yes, I (personally) have trust in the board. I know a few members of the board personally, or through work we've done together (as with you in the forums).
But I find it somewhat disconcerting that there's an aversion in the board to being "as open as possible" on topics where there aren't privacy concerns for a third party. That tells me that the board, to some degree, doesn't trust the community, and that concerns me.
Since Richard mentioned the MIB quote, let me counter with one of my own, from "A Few Good Men" - "You can't handle the truth!" - that's what it feels like the board is saying about the community.
I think the vast majority of the community is adult enough to be trusted with understanding more detail about the things that can and should be shared (like the vote that started this whole thing off). I really don't understand the resistance that some on the board are putting up to this idea. We're a community founded on the principles of free - as in libre - software. At our absolute CORE, we care about freedom. We care about openness. It's in the project charter.
But the board wants to present itself as a monolithic entity on matters that specifically don't require it.
- Are we going to deal with all the other teams like this as well? I.e.
Are the forums team going 100% transparent? Can all the mod area discussions be anonimized and publised? Same for the other teams?
You know the answer to that, Gertjan. When it comes to moderator actions, there are privacy concerns regarding third parties, particularly when it comes to suspensions. I'm disappointed that you'd go there, honestly, because you know that I have *repeatedly* said "where possible" and "where third party privacy concerns aren't a matter".
So to raise this straw man seems a bit disingenuous, my friend. You're better than that. You know it, and so do I. :)
- FWIW: I'm all for transparency, but not just like that. The process
the board has already started has to be dealt with very carefully, to make sure no one and nothing gets damaged. Like said before: seen too many occasions where this went wrong at the cost of people's reputations, personal life.
Which I have *constantly* advocated for. I wish members of the board would actually HEAR this in what I've been saying, because it's been there all along, yet at least you and Richard (both to my astonishment) have ignored that part of my points and gone for the cheap straw-man argument.
Jim
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
On Thu, 06 Sep 2018 01:54:00 +0200, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
IIRC Like in the forums, I had access to previous board data when starting as a board member. We have a closed ML, minutes have been published before, maybe not on the project ML. Whenever I asked for history I had no knowledge of, I was provided with proper information by the other board members.
That is good to know, thank you.
Like I've writen in another post on this ML, the board is working on this, let the minutes here be an example. But, like any other team in the project we cannot just go for one suggestion and make that universal truth, we need time to find out what can go public and what can't, what the community consensus is , it's a learning process for us too. Please be aware that all of the board members are looking at / participating in this thread and expressing their own thoughts. That's transparency, isn't it ?
I do appreciate the entire board's contribution to this discussion. Transparency and openness are difficult because we're only human. But as my dad always used to say, actions speak louder than words - so while discussion is good, the proof for me will be to see what the actions are the board takes as the outcome from this discussion.
I trust that the board will make a good call, and that the input of the community will be seen in their actions.
FWIW, one of the things I like about the openSUSE Project, the community, is that we can have these discussions. In the end we'll all benefit.
My 232432 cents.
Totally agreed.
Jim
On Thu, 06 Sep 2018 08:49:37 +0930, Simon Lees wrote:
This is one of the main reasons why Richard doesn't have a 2 year term, he has been around for long enough to remember most things, I think some previous boards have kept even less detailed minutes then we are at the moment and if we really want to know something we sometimes ask members of previous boards.
It's good to have that, but if ($DEITY forbid) Richard gets hit by a bus, there does need to be some succession planning and continuity planning to ensure that tribal knowledge isn't lost.
Not to mention that memory is an imperfect way to keep records. Eyewitness reports are considered very unreliable in most instances. :) That's not a question of trust, BTW, that's just another part of "human nature". :)
Jim
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.
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
I'd like to mention some things here, from the thread:
- The board has never been more transparent ( Vincent/Wafaa ) than
currently. - One of the ongoing items in the board meetings ( with publishing regular minutes on the project ML ) actually is transparency. Do not expect us to be perfect in this matter. FWIW we decided NOT to discuss this ( thread ) in our yesterday BM, instead to keep it here, with us as individuals taking part.
- What does sadden me: I've always felt that after standing up for
board ( not my personal plan, but on community request ) I could count votes as a statement of trust in that I would work as a board member in the interest of the community. From this thread I get that doesn't fit.
The community cannot know how you interpret their wishes and desires. The ones who voted for you no doubt trust you, but would probably still like to know. The ones who didn't vote for you might also like to know. Why should "trust but verify" not apply to you and/or the board?
If I would have known I'd be out in the open "stark naked", I doubt I would have stepped up. Has it ever occurred to someone that as a board member my first priority is the community, not by personal desires / opinions?
Your _personal_ interpretation of "community" is very important though. Maybe it doesn't coincide with somebodyelses interpretation. I still think it is your personal opinion on the community that matters.
- Are we going to deal with all the other teams like this as
well? I.e. Are the forums team going 100% transparent? Can all the mod area discussions be anonimized and publised? Same for the other teams?
If those teams are elected or appointed by the community, in principle I think we ought to.
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 16:22, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
- Are we going to deal with all the other teams like this as
well? I.e. Are the forums team going 100% transparent? Can all the mod area discussions be anonimized and publised? Same for the other teams?
If those teams are elected or appointed by the community, in principle I think we ought to.
What does the election or appointment have to do with it? The other teams in the Project are also doing things on your behalf. Why should privacy of decision-making be afforded to those who undemocratically declare themselves a certain function in our Project? Why can you change any thing in this project without needing to proactively explain the thoughts and reasons that led you to make that change, but the Board not?
In your role as an openSUSE hero you quite literally have access to servers that could impact the ability of thousands of contributors from contributing at a press of a button. You could delete every mailing-list right now. And their archives. And possibly even the backups. That is far more power with far greater immediate real world impacts on the Project's ability to function than anything the Board could ever decide upon or implement.
Why are all openSUSE infra tickets private by default? Why aren't the logs of every thing you type on every openSUSE server public record? Why can't I see the configuration of this mailinglist server?
Isn't it because that if all of that information was public, it would increase the risk we have to the servers that you are administering? That's a perfectly reasonable explanation to me. More people with that knowledge means more potential for malevolent individuals to make use of that information to disrupt the Project.
Also, as history as sadly taught us, it is highly stressful and in many cases demotivating when the actions you do on a voluntary basis are excruciatingly judged by a wider audience than those actually on the coal face doing the work. We've seen that with the Heroes - heck, I remember more than one occasion that Board members stepped in to try and calm down the mailinglist lynch mobs giving our Heroes a hard time as a result of decisions and actions made by the Heroes in good faith. Given the responsibility they have, and the nature of the internet if everything was public by default, I believe the Heroes decision to do things private by default, while opening as much information as they can, when they can (often after the incident is relevant), is a fair philosophy to follow.
And that philosophy is no different from what I've been advocating the whole time throughout this thread. The Board don't fix servers, we fix people. Either as individuals, or as a group, but regardless we are addressing their feelings and concerns. They are trying to do something in the Project and there is no one else for them to turn to, normally because emotions are high, or because finances are involved. or Both. Or because they normally would be able to make a decision on a topic themselves, but because of extenuating circumstances they instead make it the Boards problem. That is another example - on more than one occasion personal factors or mailinglist flamewars have resulted in otherwise empowered contributors feeling demotivated to the point where they outright refuse to make decisions they normally would themselves, and instead turn to the Board to make the decision for them. Such situations can easily be embarrassing for the individuals involved. Shouldn't the Board be trying to make it better for them, not forced to make it worse by airing their shame publicly?
Not all contributors contribute to openSUSE under their real-world names, and wish to retain their privacy, and the Board therefore need to handle their requests even more carefully than we handle the others.
And then there is also a professional aspect involved. The Board contains at least one SUSE employee and the Project contains many more, many of which are often working on openSUSE as part of their day job. And yet conflicts happen, and the Board's decisions regarding those conflicts can impact those SUSE employees, and their ability to engage with the project like the rest of their peers. In those cases, the ability for the Board to be seen only as "the Board", gives that decision weight and gravitas which helps in any subsequent discussions with SUSE about their employee. And that's just on an inter-personal aspect. If there ever is a meaningful dispute between the openSUSE organisation and SUSE, the level of privacy we currently have in the Board would be even more beneficial. If all of our votes were public, the elected members of the Board who are also SUSE employees could find themselves in a very awkward position, being required to publicly go on record against their employer. There is no way I can imagine that working out well. Currently Board can vote based on what they feel and think personally, not what will go down well publicly, not which will keep them employed, but what they believe they need to vote for the best interest of the Project.
As a side effect of the way we currently do things, the votes of the Board collectively carry the weight of _the Project_. If every individual vote can be judged and discussed at the level of detail as you see in this thread, that benefit would vanish. A single individual can make enough noise on a mailinglist or chat room to at least give some the perception that "the Project" disagrees with any decision. This is a fact of life doing things on the internet. Such disputes are a day to day occurrence. And when they happen in openSUSE, as they do, right now people can (and do) turn to the Board to step in, mediate, and when required make a decision, that has the ability to be final partially because of that less-than-wholly-transparent way we decide.
If every decision of the Board is open to the level of public flagellation as you see in this thread, I think it's safe to say that no right minded individual will ever volunteer for the Board. It would be a torturous punishment, not a difficult but necessary service provided by volunteers as it currently is. Heck, this thread is continuing despite multiple people calling for it to end. And I would consider this a mostly civilised debate. If only we had a bunch of trusted individuals who could step in and put their foot down to settle this... NOTE: I say this with a Christian-Boltz level of sarcasm. In reality I feel the actions of multiple of us in the Board has effectively forfeit our collective ability to decide on this matter in the way we would decide on other matters.
Just as we trust our admins to do their job right without giving us all root access to all the openSUSE infrastructure, I'll continue to feel the best way forward is a model where the Board have an element of privacy in their decision making, while (as we already do) minuting and sharing as much as is possible without compromising our ability to make such decisions. For everyone who disagrees with me after yet-another-stupidly-long-Richard email, I apologise, but I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree, because I really want to honour the wishes of those who called for this thread to end and I really don't want to write another mail on this topic.
Cheers,
Rich
On Thu, 06 Sep 2018 15:15:32 +0200, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
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.
And I'm good with a step-by-step approach to improve transparency. That is something that can help prevent the sort of situation you talked about - and can make it easier to see what pitfalls are there that nobody has thought about.
Seeing a plan for that would be good, though.
Op donderdag 6 september 2018 16:22:49 CEST schreef Per Jessen:
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
I'd like to mention some things here, from the thread:
- The board has never been more transparent ( Vincent/Wafaa ) than
currently. - One of the ongoing items in the board meetings ( with publishing regular minutes on the project ML ) actually is transparency. Do not expect us to be perfect in this matter. FWIW we decided NOT to discuss this ( thread ) in our yesterday BM, instead to keep it here, with us as individuals taking part.
- What does sadden me: I've always felt that after standing up for
board ( not my personal plan, but on community request ) I could count votes as a statement of trust in that I would work as a board member in the interest of the community. From this thread I get that doesn't fit.
The community cannot know how you interpret their wishes and desires. The ones who voted for you no doubt trust you, but would probably still like to know. The ones who didn't vote for you might also like to know. Why should "trust but verify" not apply to you and/or the board?
So far, only one single community member ever asked me about my personal pov/ vote on subjects the board voted on and made public. This about this thread, never before. Even though I've stated in the past that I'm willing to many times.
If I would have known I'd be out in the open "stark naked", I doubt I would have stepped up. Has it ever occurred to someone that as a board member my first priority is the community, not by personal desires / opinions?
Your _personal_ interpretation of "community" is very important though. Maybe it doesn't coincide with somebodyelses interpretation. I still think it is your personal opinion on the community that matters.
I was in the election IRC meeting, IIRC no one asked me what my POV on 'community' is, anybody could have. And my "If you have any questions, feel free to contact me" has been out there dozens of times. And FWIW, my personal interpretation of "community" has been all over the place since openSUSE exists.
- Are we going to deal with all the other teams like this as
well? I.e. Are the forums team going 100% transparent? Can all the mod area discussions be anonimized and publised? Same for the other teams?
If those teams are elected or appointed by the community, in principle I think we ought to.
Please also read my latest responses to this thread. I am *not against further transparency, defnitely not*. But, I do want to see this happening in a well thought through, a well balanced and ditto documented manner. A first step the board took ( agreed upon unanimously ) was publishing more of the minutes. And, the decision made at last BM to not have the same discussion in Board Meetings, but rather take part in this thread, was another step.
Another point of concern I have is the amount of work involved. Minutes have to be taken much more detailed than we do now, which might imply that one of the members has to focus on taking the minutes instead of actually taking part in discussions. A thing that comes to mind is having a community member taking minutes, which also would avoid mistrust re. the minutes from the board itself, but at least allow all board members to take part in discussions and be well-informed re. things that need voting. Taking detailed minutes and at the same time 100% joining a meeting is virtually impossible, at least for me :).
The main reason I'm following this thread and take part in it, is because I feel I owe that to the community that voted me on board to use my eyes and ears, and my questioning my own POVs, over and over again. For me nothing is writen in stone re. my opinions; if someone, or others, come up with things to think about and reconsider my POV, I have no hesiation to do so, even gladly.
Op donderdag 6 september 2018 17:08:37 CEST schreef Jim Henderson:
On Thu, 06 Sep 2018 15:15:32 +0200, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
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.
And I'm good with a step-by-step approach to improve transparency. That is something that can help prevent the sort of situation you talked about
- and can make it easier to see what pitfalls are there that nobody has
thought about.
Seeing a plan for that would be good, though.
Since I think that most of what can be said already has been said in this thread, this is my last post here. There's one thing though I haven't read about ( IIRC ):
A different, but IMHO equally valid, option that comes to mind, would be that the Board does not make any decisions at all ( we could hold back info from the minutes, have unverifiable votings and so on ), but instead pushes all decision making to the public area and ask the community to decide by public, named vote on any decision. That would require volunteers to set up a voting procedure on each decision to be made, have other volunteers check the voting setup etc. , an independent secretary that does the minute-taking, an independent minutes checking official, but if that's the desired way of making decisions, finding those people shouldn't be that hard. It would also cover future board elections since anyone can see how each candidate voted in the past on the wiki that will display the voting results, and it would not conflict with the Board's tasks, one of them being "facititate decision making". It would also befefit the "trust but verify" principle.
Richard Brown wrote:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 16:22, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
- Are we going to deal with all the other teams like this as
well? I.e. Are the forums team going 100% transparent? Can all the mod area discussions be anonimized and publised? Same for the other teams?
If those teams are elected or appointed by the community, in principle I think we ought to.
What does the election or appointment have to do with it? The other teams in the Project are also doing things on your behalf.
Hi Richard
I think being elected or appointed makes a significant difference compared to having more or less accidentally joined a team. I (as an arbitrary community member) did not choose/elect/appoint e.g. the forums team nor do I, to my knowledge, have any influence on it's composition. A select do-ocracy. Much like the openSUSE Heroes.
Why should privacy of decision-making be afforded to those who undemocratically declare themselves a certain function in our Project? Why can you change any thing in this project without needing to proactively explain the thoughts and reasons that led you to make that change, but the Board not?
Permit me to reply with a question - you don't see the Board taking up a special position, the board is just a team, as any other?
If the Board isn't special, why is the Board elected? If the Board is special, why should the Board not be subject to different rules?
Why are all openSUSE infra tickets private by default?
I believe the reason is that they might contain sensitive information.
Why aren't the logs of every thing you type on every openSUSE server public record? Why can't I see the configuration of this mailinglist server?
Isn't it because that if all of that information was public, it would increase the risk we have to the servers that you are administering? That's a perfectly reasonable explanation to me.
Something like that. It's the usual Linux/Unix security model.
More people with that knowledge means more potential for malevolent individuals to make use of that information to disrupt the Project.
In theory. (in practice anyone is welcome to see the root command history logs as well as the mlmmj configuration).
Given the responsibility [the Heroes] have, and the nature of the internet if everything was public by default, I believe the Heroes decision to do things private by default, while opening as much information as they can, when they can (often after the incident is relevant), is a fair philosophy to follow.
Just so we are on the same page - this _only_ applies to the ticketing system. As we cannot dictate to a user what to share with us, it is a fail-safe in case a user decides to add passwords etc.
With that one exception, the Heroes did not decide "to do things private by default", that is simply how our systems, i.e. openSUSE, work.
If all of our votes were public, the elected members of the Board who are also SUSE employees could find themselves in a very awkward position, being required to publicly go on record against their employer.
I thought it was quite clear by now that no one is asking for _every_ vote or decision to be made public, automagically? Just enable more transparency by encouraging/enabling votes to be made public, in particular if asked for or if a board member feels it is right.
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 18:31, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
Hi Richard
I think being elected or appointed makes a significant difference compared to having more or less accidentally joined a team. I (as an arbitrary community member) did not choose/elect/appoint e.g. the forums team nor do I, to my knowledge, have any influence on it's composition. A select do-ocracy. Much like the openSUSE Heroes.
I have a nuanced view on this but I want to avoid a long post. I agree with your use of the word do-ocracy for the majority of the other teams in the Project. I disagree with your statement that you can't have influence on it's composition or actions. You can step up and join the forums team if you disagree with what it's doing. That is do-ocracy at work.
You don't have that luxury with the Board. Nor would it make sense, the nature of Board work means that we will never be able to share all of the information behind our decisions. You shouldn't be able to step up and help out without getting additional information only the Board are entrusted with. The nature of Board work is to be discreet, to handle private incidents, and to intervene when do-ocracy fails. Which is why I consider both an element of privacy in the Board AND the fact the Board is elected to be mandatory. In my mind you can't have one without the other. The election grants the Board the mandate it requires to be able to do it's job in those private incidents.
If the situation can be handled by do-ocractic, and more public means, then it doesn't require the mandate granted to the Board by it's election, and shouldn't be done by the Board.
Why should privacy of decision-making be afforded to those who undemocratically declare themselves a certain function in our Project? Why can you change any thing in this project without needing to proactively explain the thoughts and reasons that led you to make that change, but the Board not?
Permit me to reply with a question - you don't see the Board taking up a special position, the board is just a team, as any other?
If the Board isn't special, why is the Board elected? If the Board is special, why should the Board not be subject to different rules?
The Board is elected because it is required to do work that no one else is in a position to handle. The project-as-a-whole cannot negotiate with our sponsors on financial matters. The project-as-a-whole cannot mediate and decide on disputes between contributors. These roles require discretion and privacy that would not be available if we were MORE transparent than the forums or openSUSE heroes teams.
Which is why I think it's a very good thing the Board is elected, because that election is a collective mandate from the project, effectively stating "we the members who voted for you trust you to do the job we need you to do, but can't do ourselves"
If we could handle everything in public, we wouldn't need that trust, we wouldn't need the election, and we wouldn't need the Board.
Why are all openSUSE infra tickets private by default?
I believe the reason is that they might contain sensitive information.
Genau. And everything the Board deals with should include sensitive information (or else, the Board shouldn't be deciding on it)
If all of our votes were public, the elected members of the Board who are also SUSE employees could find themselves in a very awkward position, being required to publicly go on record against their employer.
I thought it was quite clear by now that no one is asking for _every_ vote or decision to be made public, automagically? Just enable more transparency by encouraging/enabling votes to be made public, in particular if asked for or if a board member feels it is right.
I understand where you're coming from with the principle - but (for the last time, not because I'm frustrated with you but I really am tired of this thread) I do not believe the Board can be more transparent than we already are without undermining the function of the Board.
Or to put it another way, I could say that I accept your principle, but if there is ever a case where the Board where the Board is deciding something where I am comfortable with my vote being public, then I'll be immediately tabling a motion that the Board shouldn't be voting on the topic and should be shifting the decision to this list or delegating that responsibility to others in the Project.
You could argue that is even more transparent from a certain point of view. We need a Board for when transparency and do-ocracy fails us, I really want to preserve the environment that enables and empowers the Board to do that job. Beyond that, for everything else should be available to be grasped firmly in the hands of the community-at-large.
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
Op donderdag 6 september 2018 16:22:49 CEST schreef Per Jessen:
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
I'd like to mention some things here, from the thread:
- The board has never been more transparent ( Vincent/Wafaa ) than
currently. - One of the ongoing items in the board meetings ( with publishing regular minutes on the project ML ) actually is transparency. Do not expect us to be perfect in this matter. FWIW we decided NOT to discuss this ( thread ) in our yesterday BM, instead to keep it here, with us as individuals taking part.
- What does sadden me: I've always felt that after standing up for
board ( not my personal plan, but on community request ) I could count votes as a statement of trust in that I would work as a board member in the interest of the community. From this thread I get that doesn't fit.
The community cannot know how you interpret their wishes and desires. The ones who voted for you no doubt trust you, but would probably still like to know. The ones who didn't vote for you might also like to know. Why should "trust but verify" not apply to you and/or the board?
So far, only one single community member ever asked me about my personal pov/ vote on subjects the board voted on and made public. This about this thread, never before. Even though I've stated in the past that I'm willing to many times.
I'm not sure what to make of that. If you don't mind, what did you think about my question - as a board member, you have been given a mandate, why should "trust but verify" not apply to you and/or the board?
If I would have known I'd be out in the open "stark naked", I doubt I would have stepped up. Has it ever occurred to someone that as a board member my first priority is the community, not by personal desires / opinions?
Your _personal_ interpretation of "community" is very important though. Maybe it doesn't coincide with somebodyelses interpretation. I still think it is your personal opinion on the community that matters.
I was in the election IRC meeting, IIRC no one asked me what my POV on 'community' is, anybody could have. And my "If you have any questions, feel free to contact me" has been out there dozens of times. And FWIW, my personal interpretation of "community" has been all over the place since openSUSE exists.
Perhaps a slightly unfortunate choice of words, but I know what you mean.
I guess you are refuting that your personal opinions matter at all. I have to ask why anyone should feel that _you_ should run in the Board election rather than any other arbitrary individual? In fact, if personae do not matter at all, we don't need an election, we can just pick board members from the community, in alphabetical sequence ?
- Are we going to deal with all the other teams like this as
well? I.e. Are the forums team going 100% transparent? Can all the mod area discussions be anonimized and publised? Same for the other teams?
If those teams are elected or appointed by the community, in principle I think we ought to.
Please also read my latest responses to this thread. I am *not against further transparency, defnitely not*. But, I do want to see this happening in a well thought through, a well balanced and ditto documented manner.
Let's not kill the idea with red tape. Let the minutes document the results of votes (5-1, 3-3, 6-0 etc) and let it be up to an individual board member whether or not to make his/her vote public, especially when asked.
Richard Brown wrote:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 18:31, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
Hi Richard
I think being elected or appointed makes a significant difference compared to having more or less accidentally joined a team. I (as an arbitrary community member) did not choose/elect/appoint e.g. the forums team nor do I, to my knowledge, have any influence on it's composition. A select do-ocracy. Much like the openSUSE Heroes.
I have a nuanced view on this but I want to avoid a long post. I agree with your use of the word do-ocracy for the majority of the other teams in the Project. I disagree with your statement that you can't have influence on it's composition or actions. You can step up and join the forums team if you disagree with what it's doing. That is do-ocracy at work.
Right. I have no influence on the composition on any arbitrary team (other than joining it), but as an openSUSE member, I do have a right to vote (or abstain) for a board member of my choosing. That makes the Board different, IMHO.
You don't have that luxury with the Board. Nor would it make sense, the nature of Board work means that we will never be able to share all of the information behind our decisions. You shouldn't be able to step up and help out without getting additional information only the Board are entrusted with. The nature of Board work is to be discreet, to handle private incidents, and to intervene when do-ocracy fails. Which is why I consider both an element of privacy in the Board AND the fact the Board is elected to be mandatory.
Have we not all(?) arrived at that conclusion - there must be _some_ element of privacy for the Board to function. As for that also mandating an election, I'm not so sure, but that is an entirely different topic.
In my mind you can't have one without the other. The election grants the Board the mandate it requires to be able to do it's job in those private incidents.
Just playing devil's advocate - why couldn't that mandate be handed out like jury selection in the US? For instance, Gertjan is adamant that his personal opinions have no influence on his decisions on the board, so the next community member whose name begins with 'G' is equally well qualified.
Why should privacy of decision-making be afforded to those who undemocratically declare themselves a certain function in our Project? Why can you change any thing in this project without needing to proactively explain the thoughts and reasons that led you to make that change, but the Board not?
Permit me to reply with a question - you don't see the Board taking up a special position, the board is just a team, as any other?
If the Board isn't special, why is the Board elected? If the Board is special, why should the Board not be subject to different rules?
The Board is elected because it is required to do work that no one else is in a position to handle. The project-as-a-whole cannot negotiate with our sponsors on financial matters. The project-as-a-whole cannot mediate and decide on disputes between contributors.
I'll take that to mean "yes, the board is special", hence the Board is subject to different rules. For instance about transparency.
Which is why I think it's a very good thing the Board is elected, because that election is a collective mandate from the project, effectively stating "we the members who voted for you trust you to do the job we need you to do, but can't do ourselves"
I generally agree - except I don't believe that mandate leaves you immune to public scrutiny. "trust is good, control is better". Why are you so opposed to that idea?
Why are all openSUSE infra tickets private by default?
I believe the reason is that they might contain sensitive information.
Genau. And everything the Board deals with should include sensitive information (or else, the Board shouldn't be deciding on it)
That does not preclude a board member from publicly sharing his or her vote on a topic though. As Ana did. We don't even know the name of the local sports club yet nor who asked for sponsoring nor what kind of sponsoring. I personally have no desire to know either.
If all of our votes were public, the elected members of the Board who are also SUSE employees could find themselves in a very awkward position, being required to publicly go on record against their employer.
I thought it was quite clear by now that no one is asking for _every_ vote or decision to be made public, automagically? Just enable more transparency by encouraging/enabling votes to be made public, in particular if asked for or if a board member feels it is right.
I understand where you're coming from with the principle - but (for the last time, not because I'm frustrated with you but I really am tired of this thread) I do not believe the Board can be more transparent than we already are without undermining the function of the Board.
That is fair enough, I absolutely accept your position. Now shall we bring the proposal to a vote? I mean, let's finish the thread by tabling a motion for the board to vote on. I am not sure if my wording is good enough, I would prefer if someone could help out.
Yes, I would certainly like to know who voted what afterwards. :-)
Or to put it another way, I could say that I accept your principle, but if there is ever a case where the Board where the Board is deciding something where I am comfortable with my vote being public,
Richard, pardon me interrupting your flow, but why should you, as the Chairman, be uncomfortable with your vote being public? You have the explicit backing and trust of SUSE Linux GmbH, you were appointed not elected, you don't really have to answer to the community. I totally understand why you may feel obliged anyway, but you have no such obligation. Having to make a difficult vote public does in no way detract from your mandate. (possibly if you voted against your backers, but then it might be better to resign).
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
A different, but IMHO equally valid, option that comes to mind, would be that the Board does not make any decisions at all ( we could hold back info from the minutes, have unverifiable votings and so on ), but instead pushes all decision making to the public area and ask the community to decide by public, named vote on any decision. That would require volunteers to set up a voting procedure on each decision to be made, have other volunteers check the voting setup etc. , an independent secretary that does the minute-taking, an independent minutes checking official, but if that's the desired way of making decisions, finding those people shouldn't be that hard.
Counter proposal - as I have written twice now, let's skip board elections altogether, just have a rotating membership. The Chairman is appointed, but every other member is picked automatically from the community roster and asked to be a board member for 12 months. Anyone can decline of course, and the next one will be asked.
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 20:43, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
Which is why I think it's a very good thing the Board is elected, because that election is a collective mandate from the project, effectively stating "we the members who voted for you trust you to do the job we need you to do, but can't do ourselves"
I generally agree - except I don't believe that mandate leaves you immune to public scrutiny. "trust is good, control is better". Why are you so opposed to that idea?
Because the only way you could realistically judge whether or not the Board is making fair decisions or not, is if you had all of the information about the contributors and other organisations involved, which the Board are expected to keep private.
We already minute everything we can to the level we can, far beyond that of previous Boards in the project's 13 years. I think this is a good thing, and would hope it fulfils your desires on this topic. If it does not, then I do not see how we can satisify your demands without betraying the confidence of the people who trust the Board with their private information.
That does not preclude a board member from publicly sharing his or her vote on a topic though. As Ana did. We don't even know the name of the local sports club yet nor who asked for sponsoring nor what kind of sponsoring. I personally have no desire to know either.
Ana did not share her vote, in practice she shared ALL of our votes. Without the permission or consent of any of the Board members. The minutes (which we had collectively approved) included the numbers of the votes. Had I known that Ana wanted to share the fact publicly that she wanted her objection known I would have not consented to the meeting minutes having the numbers of the vote. This would have allowed Ana to say that she made "_a_" dissenting vote, still leaving the other votes for the other Board members suitably private.
I would have also counselled her why I think it's a bad idea for her to do that, but in that scenario she wouldn't have been able to expose the decisions of the other Board members without their consent, so it wouldn't have been nearly as bad as it was.
(NOTE: I'm only bringing this up because you did - I have accepted Ana's apology on this aspect of this topic and consider the matter closed)
That is fair enough, I absolutely accept your position. Now shall we bring the proposal to a vote? I mean, let's finish the thread by tabling a motion for the board to vote on. I am not sure if my wording is good enough, I would prefer if someone could help out.
Yes, I would certainly like to know who voted what afterwards. :-)
Answering your question with a question - why should this be something the Board decide on? should we instead consider this as a Membership vote?
Or to put it another way, I could say that I accept your principle, but if there is ever a case where the Board where the Board is deciding something where I am comfortable with my vote being public,
Richard, pardon me interrupting your flow, but why should you, as the Chairman, be uncomfortable with your vote being public? You have the explicit backing and trust of SUSE Linux GmbH, you were appointed not elected, you don't really have to answer to the community. I totally understand why you may feel obliged anyway, but you have no such obligation. Having to make a difficult vote public does in no way detract from your mandate. (possibly if you voted against your backers, but then it might be better to resign).
Fair point, and I wanted to add to my mail after I sent it to address this point - so thanks for asking. I vote as an equal board member. My vote as Chairman is no different than a vote from any other Board member. It carries no additional weight, and my employer is not consulted before any of my votes on any Board topics. When I was interviewed for consideration as Chairman, I made it very clear to SUSE that I would continue the practice that I had as an elected Board member, voting with my personal opinion of what is best for the _Project_, not the company which appointed me.
I do not agree that I have no obligation to the community - the 5 elected Board members can tell SUSE to get rid of me. That's a lot less people than the 20% of the membership that can call to get rid of them ;) So while you could argue there is a level of abstraction compared to my Board colleagues, I would argue that I'm hanging by a weaker thread than others, and therefore I take my obligations to the community very seriously (hence the fact I'm STILL writing on this thread ;))
I think it's an important part of my role as Chairman that I am not granted additional power or privilege over other Board members. I therefore think it's only fair that I share the same freedom in matters that require discretion. And yes, if you are wondering, this means that there has been times I have voted "against" the wishes of SUSE, because I thought the suggestions in question were not in the best interest of the Project.
I do not think it would have been appropriate for me to resign in that case - I'm empowered by SUSE to keep them honest. I'm a champion of the community within SUSE, not a stooge of SUSE within the community. They see my role as Chairman as an opportunity to have a direct feedback loop FROM openSUSE as much or more so than my function as being a loop TO openSUSE. To quote SUSE's CEO "if we screw up this open source stuff, we're f*cked". They're quite happy (though not always comfortable) when I use my position to help them correct things when things go a little awry.
I like to think that SUSE's internal culture is one that would be rather forgiving in the times I individually have voted in opposition to something they wanted, but I think it is more powerful for the Board to have a situation where _the Board_ as a single unified body, decided something, with my voice as part of it. As individuals, our collective power is diluted the more information we provide about who voted for once. Consider a proposal from SUSE which is voted on by the Board and we publicly announce a 5-1 split against the idea. (like we did with vote that triggered this thread) In that case people will assume I was the vote against. If that's not me, that's unfair on me. But people will take guesses and make assumptions, that's an unfortunate aspect of doing things publicly. However if we publish split with names that disclose that the 1 voter against the idea is a community member, not only is it uncomfortable for me, it would be easy for SUSE to argue that the community Board member is more important than me and leave the matter open for discussion, rather than accepting the decision as the clear decision that it would be.
Therefore, I'm happiest when we don't mention the numbers of who voted, nor the names.
While this is theoretical, it's grounded in reality - it's human nature to anyone to try and find a chink in the armour about any decision and use that as an excuse for further debate and ignoring the decision. And that's how mailinglist flame wars start.
And that's actually fine in many cases (discussions are good - like this one has been), but the Board should be the only body in the openSUSE Project that has an environment to be able to make clear decisive decisions. We need Board Decisions to end flamewars, not start them, because we're the ones who's going to be making decisions when others have failed and decisiveness is really required.
All of that said the one exception to this principle the obvious matter of the Veto power of the Chairman position. I don't think I've made it clear enough in a public venue, but when I was interviewed for the Chairman position, I made my feelings on this matter very clear to SUSE. I consider any use of a veto a failure of both the Project and SUSE to resolve the matter by any other means. I will never use the veto without direct ordering of senior/executive management at SUSE. I cannot see into the future, and I can imagine a few hypothetical examples where I might theoretically agree with any order from SUSE to use the veto, but that is a very remote possibility. I think it far more likely I will object to any such suggestion to utilise the veto, therefore such a situation would probably involve my resignation.
Even if it didn't, as any use of the veto will effectively be overruling a decision made by the Board and/or Community, the use of that veto will need to be explicitly public. There is no other way for it could be utilised.
And in that case would expect the 5 elected members of the Board to object to SUSE in the strongest terms, most likely calling for my removal. Something I would almost certainly support. So..yeah...that would be a case of mutually assured destruction, that's a button I want to keep any fingers as far away from as possible. Hopefully sharing my thoughts on that helps you better understand how I see my role as Chairman.
To put it succinctly, I see myself as a Board member with additional responsibilities to keep SUSE in the loop about the Project, and the Project in the loop about SUSE. I answer to the community before SUSE. I've been in the community many years longer than I've been at SUSE or as this Project's Chairman, and I totally intend to continue to be part of the community when any day comes that I'm no longer Chairman or at SUSE.
* Richard Brown RBrownCCB@opensuse.org [09-06-18 15:47]:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 20:43, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
[...]
That is fair enough, I absolutely accept your position. Now shall we bring the proposal to a vote? I mean, let's finish the thread by tabling a motion for the board to vote on. I am not sure if my wording is good enough, I would prefer if someone could help out.
Yes, I would certainly like to know who voted what afterwards. :-)
Answering your question with a question - why should this be something the Board decide on? should we instead consider this as a Membership vote?
instead of volumous almost answers, do it and stop talking about it. bring the matter to a vote. and probably the vote should be by the Membership as it will define actions expected from those who that same Membership ultimately elects.
asking for a close of debate and:
I hereby move for a vote by the Membership to mandate a public record of the comitteemenbers vote for, against or abstention of, for $SUBJECT, to be included in the minutes. a reason for the particular vote would be welcome but not mandatory. note that private matters as those of a particularly personal matter or of non-disclosure type would be considered outside this direction.
call for seconds
Perhaps all of this might inspire me, Jim Henderson, and others with our Point of View on this subject to run for Board Membership in next spring's elections, making this part of our platforms.
... and perhaps, you other members who are in favour of this, might make it a point to elect candidates who will at least promise to take this additional Free and Open Source Step to Transparency, or at least take it to a General Vote of the Membership.
On 07/09/2018 03:19, Per Jessen wrote:
Let's not kill the idea with red tape. Let the minutes document the results of votes (5-1, 3-3, 6-0 etc) and let it be up to an individual board member whether or not to make his/her vote public, especially when asked.
The immediate problem with that is if the vote is 5-1 and you ask the right person or 4-2 and you ask the right people you will find out what everyone else voted, even if it is against there will for you to know (In my case I may not be able to justify my decision to you without making private info that affected my reasoning public) So in most cases it really needs to be all or none and the most convenient way to do that is when the board is discussing what we minute.
On 07/09/2018 04:13, Per Jessen wrote:
Richard Brown wrote:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 18:31, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
Why are all openSUSE infra tickets private by default?
I believe the reason is that they might contain sensitive information.
Genau. And everything the Board deals with should include sensitive information (or else, the Board shouldn't be deciding on it)
That does not preclude a board member from publicly sharing his or her vote on a topic though. As Ana did. We don't even know the name of the local sports club yet nor who asked for sponsoring nor what kind of sponsoring. I personally have no desire to know either.
Well because Ana shared her opinion you then found out mine and Richards opinion which left me in a position of feeling I should justify my opinion even though I do not feel comfortables sharing my complete reasoning publically because some of my reasoning in private follows logic that potentially has a negative impact on the openSUSE communitee's ability to sponsor things in the future if I say it publicly. Which leaves you at the point of knowing I voted yes but not why and if you knew my reasoning you'd likely agree with my position but if you do not your more likely to disagree.
On 07/09/2018 05:47, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
- Richard Brown RBrownCCB@opensuse.org [09-06-18 15:47]:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 20:43, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
[...]
That is fair enough, I absolutely accept your position. Now shall we bring the proposal to a vote? I mean, let's finish the thread by tabling a motion for the board to vote on. I am not sure if my wording is good enough, I would prefer if someone could help out.
Yes, I would certainly like to know who voted what afterwards. :-)
Answering your question with a question - why should this be something the Board decide on? should we instead consider this as a Membership vote?
instead of volumous almost answers, do it and stop talking about it. bring the matter to a vote. and probably the vote should be by the Membership as it will define actions expected from those who that same Membership ultimately elects.
asking for a close of debate and:
I hereby move for a vote by the Membership to mandate a public record of the comitteemenbers vote for, against or abstention of, for $SUBJECT, to be included in the minutes. a reason for the particular vote would be welcome but not mandatory. note that private matters as those of a particularly personal matter or of non-disclosure type would be considered outside this direction.
call for seconds
I would argue that to start doing this outside of exceptional circumstances is changing the role of the board and if most members of the community actually want this they should write a clear proposal for changing the function [1] of the board as to when they should be responsible for voting and when they should put the vote to the members, if you can't clearly articulate this then how do you expect the board to? once you have written such a proposal you can then call for a vote of all members on the change to the role of the board practically it might make sense to hold such a vote at the same time as the next election.
Personally i'd strongly advocate for not making this change due to reasons already outlined in this thread.
On Thu, 2018-09-06 at 16:17 -0400, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
- Richard Brown RBrownCCB@opensuse.org [09-06-18 15:47]:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 20:43, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
[...]
That is fair enough, I absolutely accept your position. Now shall we bring the proposal to a vote? I mean, let's finish the thread by tabling a motion for the board to vote on. I am not sure if my wording is good enough, I would prefer if someone could help out.
Yes, I would certainly like to know who voted what afterwards. :- )
Answering your question with a question - why should this be something the Board decide on? should we instead consider this as a Membership vote?
instead of volumous almost answers, do it and stop talking about it. bring the matter to a vote. and probably the vote should be by the Membership as it will define actions expected from those who that same Membership ultimately elects.
asking for a close of debate and:
I hereby move for a vote by the Membership to mandate a public record of the comitteemenbers vote for, against or abstention of, for $SUBJECT, to be included in the minutes. a reason for the particular vote would be welcome but not mandatory. note that private matters as those of a particularly personal matter or of non-disclosure type would be considered outside this direction.
call for seconds
Stepping a bit late to this semi-ridiculous discussion but I disagree with both: * proposal itself to make votes part of public record * voting on this topic among openSUSE members seems unnecessary to me as well.
Cheers
Martin
On Friday, 7 September 2018 18:22:34 ACST, Martin Pluskal wrote:
On Thu, 2018-09-06 at 16:17 -0400, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
- Richard Brown RBrownCCB@opensuse.org [09-06-18 15:47]: ...
Stepping a bit late to this semi-ridiculous discussion but I disagree with both:
- proposal itself to make votes part of public record
- voting on this topic among openSUSE members seems unnecessary to me
as well.
Cheers
Martin
Given that it was the openSUSE members who initially created the role of the board and set its scope, as a board member I feel that it is the community not the board that should drive any change in its scope. From brief discussions in and out of board meetings I think that much of the board agrees with this and as such a change in the board's scope to start asking for member votes on a range of issues is likely to require a vote from members as we the board are not likely to make that change on our own.
Richard Brown wrote:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 20:43, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
Which is why I think it's a very good thing the Board is elected, because that election is a collective mandate from the project, effectively stating "we the members who voted for you trust you to do the job we need you to do, but can't do ourselves"
I generally agree - except I don't believe that mandate leaves you immune to public scrutiny. "trust is good, control is better". Why are you so opposed to that idea?
Because the only way you could realistically judge whether or not the Board is making fair decisions or not, is if you had all of the information about the contributors and other organisations involved, which the Board are expected to keep private.
I may not be representative of the community as such, but I don't want to judge if the Board is making fair decisions or not. I would like to know if a board member I voted for also voted the way I would have wanted to. I voted for Gertjan, and I should like to know his opinions continue to coincide with mine. The community may have the power to dismiss the Board, but how can we exercise this power without information?
We already minute everything we can to the level we can, far beyond that of previous Boards in the project's 13 years. I think this is a good thing, and would hope it fulfils your desires on this topic. If it does not, then I do not see how we can satisify your demands without betraying the confidence of the people who trust the Board with their private information.
You'll have to elaborate, Richard. Surely the community can be told who voted yes/no/abstain in any openSUSE Board vote? where is the private information in that? I guess I am missing something.
That does not preclude a board member from publicly sharing his or her vote on a topic though. As Ana did. We don't even know the name of the local sports club yet nor who asked for sponsoring nor what kind of sponsoring. I personally have no desire to know either.
Ana did not share her vote, in practice she shared ALL of our votes. Without the permission or consent of any of the Board members.
Is there anything in the current rules or guidelines that actually prohibit it?
That is fair enough, I absolutely accept your position. Now shall we bring the proposal to a vote? I mean, let's finish the thread by tabling a motion for the board to vote on. I am not sure if my wording is good enough, I would prefer if someone could help out.
Yes, I would certainly like to know who voted what afterwards. :-)
Answering your question with a question - why should this be something the Board decide on? should we instead consider this as a Membership vote?
Assuming it is such a significant change of the openSUSE Board guidelines/code-of-conduct/something, it would probably be up to the Board to decide it does not have the authority to decide, and defer to the community. I admit not being current with the openSUSE Board guidelines/code-of-conduct/something.
Richard, pardon me interrupting your flow, but why should you, as the Chairman, be uncomfortable with your vote being public? You have the explicit backing and trust of SUSE Linux GmbH, you were appointed not elected, you don't really have to answer to the community. I totally understand why you may feel obliged anyway, but you have no such obligation. Having to make a difficult vote public does in no way detract from your mandate. (possibly if you voted against your backers, but then it might be better to resign).
Fair point, and I wanted to add to my mail after I sent it to address this point - so thanks for asking. I vote as an equal board member. My vote as Chairman is no different than a vote from any other Board member. It carries no additional weight, and my employer is not consulted before any of my votes on any Board topics. When I was interviewed for consideration as Chairman, I made it very clear to SUSE that I would continue the practice that I had as an elected Board member, voting with my personal opinion of what is best for the _Project_, not the company which appointed me.
Right, that's only what I would have expected.
I do not agree that I have no obligation to the community - the 5 elected Board members can tell SUSE to get rid of me. That's a lot less people than the 20% of the membership that can call to get rid of them ;) So while you could argue there is a level of abstraction compared to my Board colleagues, I would argue that I'm hanging by a weaker thread than others, and therefore I take my obligations to the community very seriously (hence the fact I'm STILL writing on this thread ;))
Haha, thanks for staying. I actually have no doubt you take your obligations to the community very seriously, in no way did I want to question that. I was only wondering about why you should feel uncomfortable about your vote [on any topic] being made public and thought you had little reason to think so. I still think so.
Patrick Shanahan wrote:
- Richard Brown RBrownCCB@opensuse.org [09-06-18 15:47]:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 20:43, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
[...]
That is fair enough, I absolutely accept your position. Now shall we bring the proposal to a vote? I mean, let's finish the thread by tabling a motion for the board to vote on. I am not sure if my wording is good enough, I would prefer if someone could help out.
Yes, I would certainly like to know who voted what afterwards. :-)
Answering your question with a question - why should this be something the Board decide on? should we instead consider this as a Membership vote?
instead of volumous almost answers, do it and stop talking about it. bring the matter to a vote. and probably the vote should be by the Membership as it will define actions expected from those who that same Membership ultimately elects.
asking for a close of debate and:
I hereby move for a vote by the Membership to mandate a public record of the comitteemenbers vote for, against or abstention of, for $SUBJECT, to be included in the minutes. a reason for the particular vote would be welcome but not mandatory. note that private matters as those of a particularly personal matter or of non-disclosure type would be considered outside this direction.
call for seconds
I second the motion.
Sorry about the delay, real life keeps getting in the way. I would be happy to leave it to the Board to decide, but only provided the votes are made public.
Simon Lees wrote:
On 07/09/2018 05:47, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
asking for a close of debate and:
I hereby move for a vote by the Membership to mandate a public record of the comitteemenbers vote for, against or abstention of, for $SUBJECT, to be included in the minutes. a reason for the particular vote would be welcome but not mandatory. note that private matters as those of a particularly personal matter or of non-disclosure type would be considered outside this direction.
call for seconds
I would argue that to start doing this outside of exceptional circumstances is changing the role of the board
What Patrick proposes will change the role of the Board??? I think not. The role of the Board would not change in any way.
Personally i'd strongly advocate for not making this change due to reasons already outlined in this thread.
I find it very difficult to accept the point being argued here - "trust is enough, no need for control". I have seen noone argue that in this thread. Real life is full of examples to the contrary - Swissair? Lehmann Brothers? Greece? (just happens to have been in the news due to the anniversary).
Are there any actual rules for submitting the above to a vote by the Board? It is then up to the Board to decide whether to defer to the community, and if so, prepare a referendum at the earliest convenience.
* Per Jessen per@computer.org [09-08-18 14:32]:
Simon Lees wrote:
On 07/09/2018 05:47, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
asking for a close of debate and:
I hereby move for a vote by the Membership to mandate a public record of the comitteemenbers vote for, against or abstention of, for $SUBJECT, to be included in the minutes. a reason for the particular vote would be welcome but not mandatory. note that private matters as those of a particularly personal matter or of non-disclosure type would be considered outside this direction.
call for seconds
I would argue that to start doing this outside of exceptional circumstances is changing the role of the board
What Patrick proposes will change the role of the Board??? I think not. The role of the Board would not change in any way.
Personally i'd strongly advocate for not making this change due to reasons already outlined in this thread.
I find it very difficult to accept the point being argued here - "trust is enough, no need for control". I have seen noone argue that in this thread. Real life is full of examples to the contrary - Swissair? Lehmann Brothers? Greece? (just happens to have been in the news due to the anniversary).
Are there any actual rules for submitting the above to a vote by the Board? It is then up to the Board to decide whether to defer to the community, and if so, prepare a referendum at the earliest convenience.
you would at least think a member making a motion and calling for a vote would be recognized as such or denied outright as not prudent or ....
is accountability not deemed a necessary attribute? in the particular case it is only to one's reputation which is how the board members are elected. and atm that only amounts to a "popularity contest" as we have no basis to judge who may best represent us in the manner we expect.
Op zaterdag 8 september 2018 19:33:22 CEST schreef Per Jessen:
Patrick Shanahan wrote:
- Richard Brown RBrownCCB@opensuse.org [09-06-18 15:47]:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 20:43, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
[...]
That is fair enough, I absolutely accept your position. Now shall we bring the proposal to a vote? I mean, let's finish the thread by tabling a motion for the board to vote on. I am not sure if my wording is good enough, I would prefer if someone could help out.
Yes, I would certainly like to know who voted what afterwards. :-)
Answering your question with a question - why should this be something the Board decide on? should we instead consider this as a Membership vote?
instead of volumous almost answers, do it and stop talking about it. bring the matter to a vote. and probably the vote should be by the Membership as it will define actions expected from those who that same Membership ultimately elects.
asking for a close of debate and:
I hereby move for a vote by the Membership to mandate a public record of the comitteemenbers vote for, against or abstention of, for $SUBJECT, to be included in the minutes. a reason for the particular vote would be welcome but not mandatory. note that private matters as those of a particularly personal matter or of non-disclosure type would be considered outside this direction.
call for seconds
I second the motion.
Per, shouldn't voting happen in controlled environment, like our Helios voting system? And be documented instead of in this thread? I'd like to be sure the number of pro and contra votes are 100% correct and reliable, with a clear start and beginning of the voting time, and not depend on posts in a thread like this.
Sorry about the delay, real life keeps getting in the way. I would be happy to leave it to the Board to decide, but only provided the votes are made public.
Simon Lees wrote:
On 07/09/2018 04:13, Per Jessen wrote:
Richard Brown wrote:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 18:31, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
Why are all openSUSE infra tickets private by default?
I believe the reason is that they might contain sensitive information.
Genau. And everything the Board deals with should include sensitive information (or else, the Board shouldn't be deciding on it)
That does not preclude a board member from publicly sharing his or her vote on a topic though. As Ana did. We don't even know the name of the local sports club yet nor who asked for sponsoring nor what kind of sponsoring. I personally have no desire to know either.
Well because Ana shared her opinion you then found out mine and Richards opinion which left me in a position of feeling I should justify my opinion
That discussion / this thread only arose because we did not know your votes.
Which leaves you at the point of knowing I voted yes but not why and if you knew my reasoning you'd likely agree with my position but if you do not your more likely to disagree.
I am happy knowing just _what_ you voted. If you feel a need to defend your position to your electorate, but you cannot due to being unable to share the information needed, I recommend you resign.
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
Op zaterdag 8 september 2018 19:33:22 CEST schreef Per Jessen:
Patrick Shanahan wrote:
- Richard Brown RBrownCCB@opensuse.org [09-06-18 15:47]:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 20:43, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
[...]
That is fair enough, I absolutely accept your position. Now shall we bring the proposal to a vote? I mean, let's finish the thread by tabling a motion for the board to vote on. I am not sure if my wording is good enough, I would prefer if someone could help out.
Yes, I would certainly like to know who voted what afterwards. :-)
Answering your question with a question - why should this be something the Board decide on? should we instead consider this as a Membership vote?
instead of volumous almost answers, do it and stop talking about it. bring the matter to a vote. and probably the vote should be by the Membership as it will define actions expected from those who that same Membership ultimately elects.
asking for a close of debate and:
I hereby move for a vote by the Membership to mandate a public record of the comitteemenbers vote for, against or abstention of, for $SUBJECT, to be included in the minutes. a reason for the particular vote would be welcome but not mandatory. note that private matters as those of a particularly personal matter or of non-disclosure type would be considered outside this direction.
call for seconds
I second the motion.
Per, shouldn't voting happen in controlled environment, like our Helios voting system? And be documented instead of in this thread?
Yes, it most certainly does not belong in this thread, agree. The topic has to be brought to a wider audience.
I'd like to be sure the number of pro and contra votes are 100% correct and reliable, with a clear start and beginning of the voting time, and not depend on posts in a thread like this.
I find it is a somewhat minor change and as such I would be happy to leave it to the Board to decide - provided I know who voted what. If the Board would want to vote in the usual secret, I would ask for a community referendum.
On 09/09/2018 03:18, Per Jessen wrote:
Simon Lees wrote:
On 07/09/2018 05:47, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
asking for a close of debate and:
I hereby move for a vote by the Membership to mandate a public record of the comitteemenbers vote for, against or abstention of, for $SUBJECT, to be included in the minutes. a reason for the particular vote would be welcome but not mandatory. note that private matters as those of a particularly personal matter or of non-disclosure type would be considered outside this direction.
call for seconds
I would argue that to start doing this outside of exceptional circumstances is changing the role of the board
What Patrick proposes will change the role of the Board??? I think not. The role of the Board would not change in any way.
No what was proposed toward the end of this thread was that the board start putting decisions to a vote of all members which clearly is a change.
On 09/09/2018 05:26, Per Jessen wrote:
Simon Lees wrote:
On 07/09/2018 04:13, Per Jessen wrote:
Richard Brown wrote:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 18:31, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
Why are all openSUSE infra tickets private by default?
I believe the reason is that they might contain sensitive information.
Genau. And everything the Board deals with should include sensitive information (or else, the Board shouldn't be deciding on it)
That does not preclude a board member from publicly sharing his or her vote on a topic though. As Ana did. We don't even know the name of the local sports club yet nor who asked for sponsoring nor what kind of sponsoring. I personally have no desire to know either.
Well because Ana shared her opinion you then found out mine and Richards opinion which left me in a position of feeling I should justify my opinion
That discussion / this thread only arose because we did not know your votes.
Which leaves you at the point of knowing I voted yes but not why and if you knew my reasoning you'd likely agree with my position but if you do not your more likely to disagree.
I am happy knowing just _what_ you voted. If you feel a need to defend your position to your electorate, but you cannot due to being unable to share the information needed, I recommend you resign.
Well then I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree and you can choose not to vote for me next time. Because if I vote on a controversial topic where 90% of the info is private I don't know how you expect me to be able to say why I voted in a certain way and really in my opinion knowing what I voted does not help you form an opinion of how I managed a situation but knowing why I voted most certainly does, if you don't know the why then your just guessing and your guess maybe completely wrong especially if you don't know the info and personally I don't want you to be basing your vote for me on guesses and assumptions you've made about what i've done id much rather it was based on the facts so you can actually make a proper decision.
* Simon Lees sflees@suse.de [09-08-18 19:25]:
On 09/09/2018 03:18, Per Jessen wrote:
Simon Lees wrote:
On 07/09/2018 05:47, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
asking for a close of debate and:
I hereby move for a vote by the Membership to mandate a public record of the comitteemenbers vote for, against or abstention of, for $SUBJECT, to be included in the minutes. a reason for the particular vote would be welcome but not mandatory. note that private matters as those of a particularly personal matter or of non-disclosure type would be considered outside this direction.
call for seconds
I would argue that to start doing this outside of exceptional circumstances is changing the role of the board
What Patrick proposes will change the role of the Board??? I think not. The role of the Board would not change in any way.
No what was proposed toward the end of this thread was that the board start putting decisions to a vote of all members which clearly is a change.
no, that was definitely NOT the request. the request was a call for a vote by the membership to have board voting records public except where non-disclosure or personal issues were present. we would like to know how members of the board vote.
after all, the board is elected to represent the membership. how is the membership to know who to elect or if the elected follow what we were led to believe they would do. there needs to be some accounting.
* Simon Lees sflees@suse.de [09-08-18 19:33]:
On 09/09/2018 05:26, Per Jessen wrote:
Simon Lees wrote:
On 07/09/2018 04:13, Per Jessen wrote:
Richard Brown wrote:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 18:31, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
> Why are all openSUSE infra tickets private by default?
I believe the reason is that they might contain sensitive information.
Genau. And everything the Board deals with should include sensitive information (or else, the Board shouldn't be deciding on it)
That does not preclude a board member from publicly sharing his or her vote on a topic though. As Ana did. We don't even know the name of the local sports club yet nor who asked for sponsoring nor what kind of sponsoring. I personally have no desire to know either.
Well because Ana shared her opinion you then found out mine and Richards opinion which left me in a position of feeling I should justify my opinion
That discussion / this thread only arose because we did not know your votes.
Which leaves you at the point of knowing I voted yes but not why and if you knew my reasoning you'd likely agree with my position but if you do not your more likely to disagree.
I am happy knowing just _what_ you voted. If you feel a need to defend your position to your electorate, but you cannot due to being unable to share the information needed, I recommend you resign.
Well then I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree and you can choose not to vote for me next time. Because if I vote on a controversial topic where 90% of the info is private I don't know how you expect me to be able to say why I voted in a certain way and really in my opinion knowing what I voted does not help you form an opinion of how I managed a situation but knowing why I voted most certainly does, if you don't know the why then your just guessing and your guess maybe completely wrong especially if you don't know the info and personally I don't want you to be basing your vote for me on guesses and assumptions you've made about what i've done id much rather it was based on the facts so you can actually make a proper decision.
no way to know how you voted unless you reveal such. and no one is demanding private information.
how can anyone base a vote on anyone w/o and information on their expected performance?
why do you want the membership to have to guess how you perform your elected position? do not be afraid of accountability. it is what keeps us honest.
no one is attempting to haul you up on charges, only for the board to be accountable to the membership who elected them.
it is not a personal thing.
On 09/09/2018 09:18, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
- Simon Lees sflees@suse.de [09-08-18 19:25]:
On 09/09/2018 03:18, Per Jessen wrote:
Simon Lees wrote:
On 07/09/2018 05:47, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
asking for a close of debate and:
I hereby move for a vote by the Membership to mandate a public record of the comitteemenbers vote for, against or abstention of, for $SUBJECT, to be included in the minutes. a reason for the particular vote would be welcome but not mandatory. note that private matters as those of a particularly personal matter or of non-disclosure type would be considered outside this direction.
call for seconds
I would argue that to start doing this outside of exceptional circumstances is changing the role of the board
What Patrick proposes will change the role of the Board??? I think not. The role of the Board would not change in any way.
No what was proposed toward the end of this thread was that the board start putting decisions to a vote of all members which clearly is a change.
no, that was definitely NOT the request. the request was a call for a vote by the membership to have board voting records public except where non-disclosure or personal issues were present. we would like to know how members of the board vote.
Well you can do this if you want but its not going to have a big impact as the board almost never deals with issues that don't involve non-disclosure or personal issues. The whole point of the board is to deal with these issues because no one else in the project can. If we are dealing with anything that is not one of these issues you have the right to ask the board why are we dealing with something that could be handled by the community.
On 09/09/2018 09:23, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
- Simon Lees sflees@suse.de [09-08-18 19:33]:
On 09/09/2018 05:26, Per Jessen wrote:
Simon Lees wrote:
On 07/09/2018 04:13, Per Jessen wrote:
Richard Brown wrote:
On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 18:31, Per Jessen per@computer.org wrote:
>> Why are all openSUSE infra tickets private by default? > > I believe the reason is that they might contain sensitive > information.
Genau. And everything the Board deals with should include sensitive information (or else, the Board shouldn't be deciding on it)
That does not preclude a board member from publicly sharing his or her vote on a topic though. As Ana did. We don't even know the name of the local sports club yet nor who asked for sponsoring nor what kind of sponsoring. I personally have no desire to know either.
Well because Ana shared her opinion you then found out mine and Richards opinion which left me in a position of feeling I should justify my opinion
That discussion / this thread only arose because we did not know your votes.
Which leaves you at the point of knowing I voted yes but not why and if you knew my reasoning you'd likely agree with my position but if you do not your more likely to disagree.
I am happy knowing just _what_ you voted. If you feel a need to defend your position to your electorate, but you cannot due to being unable to share the information needed, I recommend you resign.
Well then I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree and you can choose not to vote for me next time. Because if I vote on a controversial topic where 90% of the info is private I don't know how you expect me to be able to say why I voted in a certain way and really in my opinion knowing what I voted does not help you form an opinion of how I managed a situation but knowing why I voted most certainly does, if you don't know the why then your just guessing and your guess maybe completely wrong especially if you don't know the info and personally I don't want you to be basing your vote for me on guesses and assumptions you've made about what i've done id much rather it was based on the facts so you can actually make a proper decision.
no way to know how you voted unless you reveal such. and no one is demanding private information.
how can anyone base a vote on anyone w/o and information on their expected performance?
Well everyone on the current board has been elected from not being on the board and once we are elected to the board you really don't see that much of what we do even now we take minutes because its mostly dealing with private issues.
why do you want the membership to have to guess how you perform your elected position? do not be afraid of accountability. it is what keeps us honest.
When most of the important issues we are dealing with are in the areas of conflict resolution yes your going to have to guess although a reasonable indication might be that conflicts are generally being resolved without turning into hate threads on public mailing lists.
If you are only electing board members based on the 10% of there activities that you actually see you are probably choosing them on the wrong criteria.
* Simon Lees sflees@suse.de [09-08-18 20:19]: [...]
Well everyone on the current board has been elected from not being on the board and once we are elected to the board you really don't see that much of what we do even now we take minutes because its mostly dealing with private issues.
why do you want the membership to have to guess how you perform your elected position? do not be afraid of accountability. it is what keeps us honest.
When most of the important issues we are dealing with are in the areas of conflict resolution yes your going to have to guess although a reasonable indication might be that conflicts are generally being resolved without turning into hate threads on public mailing lists.
If you are only electing board members based on the 10% of there activities that you actually see you are probably choosing them on the wrong criteria.
then except for your "resume" presented when running for election, there is for the most part only "wrong criteria" on which to make a decision.
I would like to know how you vote on those issues which can be made public w/o damage to someone's character or violation of a non-disclosure.
is that so hard?
and I believe that *most* of the membership would agree.
we don't want dirty underwear.
* Simon Lees sflees@suse.de [09-08-18 20:08]:
On 09/09/2018 09:18, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
- Simon Lees sflees@suse.de [09-08-18 19:25]:
On 09/09/2018 03:18, Per Jessen wrote:
Simon Lees wrote:
On 07/09/2018 05:47, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
asking for a close of debate and:
I hereby move for a vote by the Membership to mandate a public record of the comitteemenbers vote for, against or abstention of, for $SUBJECT, to be included in the minutes. a reason for the particular vote would be welcome but not mandatory. note that private matters as those of a particularly personal matter or of non-disclosure type would be considered outside this direction.
call for seconds
I would argue that to start doing this outside of exceptional circumstances is changing the role of the board
What Patrick proposes will change the role of the Board??? I think not. The role of the Board would not change in any way.
No what was proposed toward the end of this thread was that the board start putting decisions to a vote of all members which clearly is a change.
no, that was definitely NOT the request. the request was a call for a vote by the membership to have board voting records public except where non-disclosure or personal issues were present. we would like to know how members of the board vote.
Well you can do this if you want but its not going to have a big impact as the board almost never deals with issues that don't involve non-disclosure or personal issues. The whole point of the board is to deal with these issues because no one else in the project can. If we are dealing with anything that is not one of these issues you have the right to ask the board why are we dealing with something that could be handled by the community.
I believe that is exactly what we have requested multiple times in this thread and been met with adamant resistance or better said, a stone wall.
Gesendet: Sonntag, 09. September 2018 um 02:47 Uhr Von: "Patrick Shanahan" paka@opensuse.org An: opensuse-project@opensuse.org Betreff: Re: [opensuse-project] Re: Board Meeting Minutes of August 21 2018
- Simon Lees sflees@suse.de [09-08-18 20:19]:
[...]
Well everyone on the current board has been elected from not being on the board and once we are elected to the board you really don't see that much of what we do even now we take minutes because its mostly dealing with private issues.
why do you want the membership to have to guess how you perform your elected position? do not be afraid of accountability. it is what keeps us honest.
When most of the important issues we are dealing with are in the areas of conflict resolution yes your going to have to guess although a reasonable indication might be that conflicts are generally being resolved without turning into hate threads on public mailing lists.
If you are only electing board members based on the 10% of there activities that you actually see you are probably choosing them on the wrong criteria.
then except for your "resume" presented when running for election, there is for the most part only "wrong criteria" on which to make a decision.
I would like to know how you vote on those issues which can be made public w/o damage to someone's character or violation of a non-disclosure.
is that so hard?
and I believe that *most* of the membership would agree.
we don't want dirty underwear.
I would say it depends on the topic. Sometimes we have to discuss. Another topic needs only 1 time reading, hearing different opinions in some small sentences and after that you can have the decision.
The Board exist with different people you have elected. So we can have different opinions. If we have a 50:50 or 60:40 decision as a result, we follow the topic up a matter with a new discussion. If only 1 person votes against the decision, this person has to accept the voting of the others. That's democrazy. The only question is how much or what should be made public. Do we really want to read the name of the Board Member who voted against? Is that necessary? On the other side we have European rules like the new European privacy regulation. So we are not allowed to publish names without any agreement.
Best regards, Sarah
* Sarah Julia Kriesch ada.lovelace@gmx.de [09-10-18 05:25]:
I would say it depends on the topic. Sometimes we have to discuss. Another topic needs only 1 time reading, hearing different opinions in some small sentences and after that you can have the decision.
The Board exist with different people you have elected. So we can have different opinions. If we have a 50:50 or 60:40 decision as a result, we follow the topic up a matter with a new discussion. If only 1 person votes against the decision, this person has to accept the voting of the others. That's democrazy. The only question is how much or what should be made public. Do we really want to read the name of the Board Member who voted against? Is that necessary?
I fail to see the problem with revealing the vote weather one or two or ... do not follow the majority. there is no shame in disagreement, it only shows disagreement. unless there is a unanimous result, there will always be a dissenter, one or more who disagree. a consensus does not require unanimity.
On the other side we have European rules like the new European privacy regulation. So we are not allowed to publish names without any agreement.
I would surely thing that to be a member of the board, one would be compelled to agree to the rules for the board, so the problem of agreement does not exist, or we have board member(s) who should not be on the board.
when one puts aside the possibility of revealing personal data or non-disclosure items, I fail to see the problem with revealing the vote. either I am quite dense (a definite possibiltiy) or you (collective) have failed to present a compelling agrument.
reveal the vote with respect to the two situations above or call for a vote from the board about revealing the vote, or present it to the membership for a vote. and the board voting on this would be somewhat self-serving. I believe the membership should decide.
btw, I read the lists and see the posts there. I have not requested and have absolutely no requirement for an additional personal mail for what I can read on the lists.
Gesendet: Montag, 10. September 2018 um 15:10 Uhr Von: "Patrick Shanahan" paka@opensuse.org An: opensuse-project@opensuse.org Betreff: Re: [opensuse-project] Re: Board Meeting Minutes of August 21 2018
I fail to see the problem with revealing the vote weather one or two or ... do not follow the majority. there is no shame in disagreement, it only shows disagreement. unless there is a unanimous result, there will always be a dissenter, one or more who disagree. a consensus does not require unanimity.
That's the result of the new transparency. I can tell you at first I thought the same as you. I created Board Meeting minutes with names and gave it for a review to the other Members of the Board. What do you believe happened then? Some of them didn't want to read their name. We had a small discussion about our default structure in our Board Meeting Minutes.
On the other side we have European rules like the new European privacy regulation. So we are not allowed to publish names without any agreement.
I would surely thing that to be a member of the board, one would be compelled to agree to the rules for the board, so the problem of agreement does not exist, or we have board member(s) who should not be on the board.
when one puts aside the possibility of revealing personal data or non-disclosure items, I fail to see the problem with revealing the vote. either I am quite dense (a definite possibiltiy) or you (collective) have failed to present a compelling agrument.
You are elected for the position in the openSUSE Board, because the community trusts in you. You can find our rules and what we have to do here: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Guiding_principles#Governance Is there anything about the handling of disagreements? In the past, Richard wrote only small summaries about Board meetings. We wanted to change it to show what we are doing. So we can receive your feedback and know what you want to have improved.
reveal the vote with respect to the two situations above or call for a vote from the board about revealing the vote, or present it to the membership for a vote. and the board voting on this would be somewhat self-serving. I believe the membership should decide.
At the moment we have people who don't prefer that. So we have to discuss that.
btw, I read the lists and see the posts there. I have not requested and have absolutely no requirement for an additional personal mail for what I can read on the lists.
-- (paka)Patrick Shanahan Plainfield, Indiana, USA @ptilopteri http://en.opensuse.org openSUSE Community Member facebook/ptilopteri Registered Linux User #207535 @ http://linuxcounter.net Photos: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/piwigo paka @ IRCnet freenode -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org
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