Minutes for board meeting 2021-08-02
Hi all, here are the minutes for the board's meeting on 2021-08-02. They are on the wiki as well. [1] = Board Meeting Minutes 2021-08-02 1300 CEST = Attendees: Axel, Gertjan, Gerald, Neal, Simon, Vinz Excused: Syds Minutes: Vinz Guests: Attila, Maurizio, Orunalp Sezer Topics from https://code.opensuse.org/board/tickets/issues?status=Open&tags=meeting == Teams and Sharing/Communications == https://code.opensuse.org/board/tickets/issue/25 * Board has been working on transparency, task tracking, meeting minutes etc. * Question is how to encourage other teams to the same route * Last attempt tried in 2020 to ask for reportings of other teams failed * Question to the community: how can the communication sharing with others be improved? == Membership Solution == https://code.opensuse.org/board/tickets/issue/24 * TDF is working on a membership solution * AI Gertjan: Issue will be handed over to heroes for FYI reasons, added syncing with Marina and Lars == openSUSE Asia Summit == https://code.opensuse.org/board/tickets/issue/21 * Issue can be closed, topic is handled Meeting closed 13:55 CEST Cheers, vinz. [1] https://en.opensuse.org/Archive:Board_meeting_2021-08-02
On Tue, 10 Aug 2021 22:08:02 +0200 Vinzenz Vietzke wrote:
* Question to the community: how can the communication sharing with others be improved?
The only way, I remembered working for a while, was someone who joined all team meetings (or at least reviewed the meeting minutes) and also reviewed forum posts, IRC channels and mailing lists - to provide the "weekly news". As this is hard work and costs a lot of time, all attempts to do this stopped sooner or later, when the volunteers had no time any longer. I have to admit that these persons had my deepest respect for their work, as collecting all the information from all the various places was definitively not an easy task. Maybe the weekly news hasn't to be done weekly, but quarterly? Maybe some of the team members (which ones do you have in focus to share their work, btw?) can be triggered somehow to submit their news to some known places - like planet.o.o? Maybe we need someone who actively pushes the teams to submit results? Maybe we need another tool (like https://rabbit.opensuse.org/), which can be feed by various teams and services (overloading people with 'communication')? Maybe we should ask our community, what they expect to hear from the various teams - and in which schedule? with kind regards, Lars
Am Tue, 10 Aug 2021 23:33:03 +0200 schrieb Vinzenz Vietzke <vinz@vinzv.de>:
I tried pushing twice to get this running in the past years. There was hardly any interest from the community.
What exactly? Get volunteers for a 24/7 job (collecting and editing information), that is normally done by paid Journalists? :-) That's indeed my main concern about this "we need more communication" topic: people choose to join "their" teams because they feel welcome. Once they have their "family" around them, there not much need to communicate outside this family any longer. Especially for nerds like me, who talk more to their computer than to their family anyway ;-) Just think about our current amount of communication tooling: * IRC * Forums * Mailing lists * Matrix channels * Discourse channels * OBS Web-discussions * Github issues and merge request comments * Telegram, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, ... I for sure missed some, sorry for that. How on earth to we - as openSUSE community - expect to reach out to everyone on one/all of these channels? Big companies like Amazon, Google and M$ struggle with their communication strategies, while they have big teams paid for exactly this. So I'm back to the last question from my former Email: What does our community expect to hear from the various teams - and in which schedule? (and maybe I need to add: on which communication platform?) And I like to add: Who exactly is currently not happy with the existing communication? - At the moment, I assume the board is not happy, as this topic came out of the board minutes, correct? Regards, Lars
Hi there, everyone, Just in time for this topic. As per my email to the marketing mailing list (https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/marketing@lists.opensuse.org/thread...) the other day, here's my 2c. I work in marketing, done even a short stint in a company doing marketing for developers (I'll add a caveat about marketing). Yes, we have a board. Then we have people in the various teams. What openSUSE needs is community builders. That's exactly what the people you say MS, Apple and rest are doing. The do-ocracy principle is great for setting the bar down the bazaar so everyone can participate how they see fit. Where the problems occur (cc the Project mailing list regarding the wiki conundrum) is that there's no communication. It's quite OK that openSUSE doesn't have project managers and such, but as a result, there's work being done that's siloed off, and a newsman doesn't know what is being done, how far is it from being done, is it even good/worth reporting on. In such a state, I agree, weekly news is simply too much. I, myself, I have a full-time job, a kid and I wake up at 5AM doing online courses to better myself. In these mornings I would like to invest some time to help out openSUSE as I did years before. What I can't do, is go around poking people what's new and what isn't. What would help, would be a logging system, kanban board, /.../, where people would: 1- get exposure for the great work they're doing 2- log what's being done so we can filter out interesting parts And this thing, that would also be of much help: - etherpad reporting (seems that wiki entries are too obsolete, so there's got to be something with adding extra friction to the process) in an *asynchronous* way. Like a daily/weekly standup, but async when the team members actually have time. You jot down what you're working on, and we then contact you for byweekly or monthly news. But, to get back on topic. Problems I see are: - doocracy allowing people to "do", but they aren't vocal about it - no way for someone trying to do community building to find information in a structured and time-efficient way (I don't know why it's presupposed that people who are doing technical work should have reduced barriers, but people doing marketing are on their own) Anyway, we Tweet about how openSUSE is underrated, but are yet to tell the people *why*. The best work in this field has been done by sysrich when I was active a couple of years ago, the dude was all over reddit, irc and blogging away in a really nice manner, explaining the strengths of openSUSE. I think we should build on that. I am also drafting a SEO and content plan, will communicate when I wrap it up (nothing revolutionary, just to find channels where we could get new folks and communicate with others). But yes, in technical projects, community building is a must. I, for one, appreciate the "adultness" of openSUSE, mainly folks getting in and grinding away without fuss, but that, from the outside, looks like the project is simply dead. And as I see, it's not :) Have a great one, will be getting back and hope for some feedback on this one. -- Nenad Latinović nenad@latinovic.si
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Wednesday, August 11th, 2021 at 11:56 AM, Nenad Latinović <nenad@latinovic.si> wrote:
Frankly we've been talking a lot about the communication issues in openSUSE in the /bar. And when I say a lot I mean this comes up almost every single time we're in there, but getting a hold on the matter is not trivial. Or at least not to me. We would probably need this type of community building what you're suggesting. Fedora is not half bad at this kind of things, maybe we could observe what they're doing and cherry pick and see what works for us? Not super sure. I can speak for the docs project tho, we're communicating at Telegram mostly (, but also use the doc ML on occasions, died down cause we didn't get much interest from there sadly, but it is very much open) as that is the origin of the "new volunteers/team", but during every meeting we (Adrien) take minutes which are distributed over the wiki and conversations are mostly happening under Github issues in regards to topics where anybody can just jump in to. I think the Leap release team is also doing a great job exposing their minutes on etherpad. Anyhow at docs we usually talk quite a lot and the telegram group is bridged with Matrix and Discord as well so communication shouldn't be much of an issue. We strongly believe that video calls and comms in general are a great way to boost productivity across the project and would be great to see other projects having a similar practice, but it would require motivation to do it not a "rule". How to do that is beyond me. Br, A.
Hi, Fedora is fantastic at that, considering they are also made up of volunteers. Unpopular opinion (and not too pertinent, as it's a company): nobody in the GNU/Linux world has done it better than Ubuntu back in the Jono Bacon days. He was a laughing stock by a vocal minority, but he and Mark realized how important structured community building is way back when. Now every SaaS halfwit is trying to do the same, as that is the only way to reach more technical people, who are analytical and hold a personal grudge with marketing fluff :) Basically, to start off, we would need just a human readable log where people involved in the project could write what they are doing in a centrally located place, so we don't spend hours on time looking for viable info. Maybe an opensuse instance of OpenProject? Any thoughts? (I am really thinking about a really low-input "I'm doing this and that and when I finish I expect XYZ as an output". From then on everything is much easier. As for a chat liaison, I see some really meaningful/important people being very present there, so that's great (as I can't be present more than 30mins/day). As for the rest, I'm analyzing the page every day and will come up with a plan that I'll put into communication when time comes. -- Nenad Latinović nenad@latinovic.si
On 8/11/21 7:27 AM, Lars Vogdt wrote:
One of the contexts here is in terms of newer members of the community who want to contribute. If someone is newer and wants to contribute for some people this can be an easy process because they may see a bug in a package and head off to fix it (this is kinda how I started) or if they are interested in helping with IT infra its easy to direct someone to a Heroes meeting. But there are many other teams that people may not know exist because they tend to "sit in there silo" this can make it hard for others to know about them and what they are doing which makes it hard for them to join and help.
This is a good question, maybe something like a quarterly or half yearly report of things that the team has been involved in would be helpful and useful. Some teams are pretty good at giving talks on the openSUSE conference which is really helpful but often doesn't have the greatest reach. Another simple idea could be to get all teams that are having meetings and publishing minutes to do so in the same place maybe here, or maybe that would create too much noise and it should have a dedicated list but then instantly you start to have some form of cross team communications.
Some of this has been raised with the board by members of the community, particularly in the context of making it easier for new contributors. Another factor is there is a belief that the board should be accountable for everything that goes on in the project, at the end of the day currently there are many places where the board has no idea atm. Having said that at the moment this isn't critical because currently were not legally accountable, however if in the future we wind up having a foundation the board maybe so its something worth trying to prepare for especially given that it will have other benefits for the community. Cheers, -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B
participants (5)
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Attila Pinter -
Lars Vogdt -
Nenad Latinović -
Simon Lees -
Vinzenz Vietzke