Dear Project, For those who may not know, openSUSE Members are those contributors who have rights to vote in openSUSE Board elections or other votes requiring a formal decision by the Project as a whole. At this years annual Face to Face Board meeting, the Board decided to change the rules related to the Membership eligibility and approval process, based on the proposal and feedback from this thread in February https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2018-02/msg00015.html We announced the change at the openSUSE Conference, and are aware that at least some of the Membership Officials have been conducting their business since aligned with the new rules. However, as part of their job in preparing for the upcoming elections, our Election Committee noted that the documentation on our wiki was inconsistent and out-of-date with these decisions. They were, very rightly, uncomfortable with conducting the elections with any ambiguity regarding our membership process. As the Board Member who was intended to update those pages, I'd like to apologise to my colleagues on the Board, the Election team, and the Project as a whole for dropping the ball on this one. As an Election committee has been formed and elections are upcoming, normally the Board would stay well away from involving itself in anything to do with Elections and/or Membership. This is to avoid any conflicts of interest and preserve the integrity of the elction, as it is the Membership who elect the Board, and it's entirely possible current Board members might seek re-election in the upcoming election. However, to rectify this situation I have now updated the appropriate places on the Wiki https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Members https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Membership_officials#Process To summarise the changes to the Membership Rules * Contributors can become Members once they have contributed to the Project in a measurable way and requested Membership * Members remain Members as long as they wish, but inactive Members will be sent annual reminders to see whether they wish to remain a member. * Retired Members in good standing become "Members Emeritus" and retain all the Perks of being a Member, besides voting and eligibility to run for the openSUSE Board. The changes to the process followed by the Membership Officials are as follows * Applicants now only require 1 positive and 0 negative votes from the Membership Officials to become a Member * Acceptances/Rejections should be done by a different Official than the first voting (so in essence, 2 positive votes are required, with an opportunity for objections to be raised) * Disputed decisions require Membership Officials to discuss amongst themselves before rejecting. Deadlocked decisions can be escalated to the Board. * We hope to replace connect.opensuse.org. Any contributions/ideas from anyone are welcome (WE NEED HELP). Replacing connect.o.o presents an opportunity to add layers of automation to streamline this process, such as automatically verifying contributions and ongoing activity to prevent the need to send annual reminders. While the above has been long discussed, partly announced, and significant parts of the Project have been operating under the new rules, the Board recognises that this could be seen as changing the rules right before an election. This situation was discussed during this weeks Board meeting, during which the Board decided to go ahead with these changes. To avoid any conflicts of interest, the 2 potentially conflicted Board members who may stand for re-election in the upcoming election were not allowed to vote on this decision. This decision was however passed by all 4 of the remaining Board members. This unanimous decision by the remainder of the Board constitutes a 2/3rds majority which is required to amend our election rules (https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_rules#Amendment:) This should hopefully negate any concerns that this documentation of our previous decisions is not intended to impact the upcoming election, but is a necessary action by the Board to enable the Election Committee to go forward as they see fit. All of these actions have been discussed with and approved by our Election Committee, and this announcement can be seen as a joint statement from both the Board and the Election Committee. Regards, Richard Brown openSUSE Chairman -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org