And yet both you and Doug were totally absent from the discussions till now. Discussions which your input could have been useful in.

The fact that I choose not to engage with a topic is my right. It's who I am, like it or not.

My views that you should be more directly engaged with the community are reinforced by how fast you and Doug have appeared to defend yourselves.

I'm not defending anything. I'm expressing my belief that I have a right to share my opinions with whom I wish to share those opinions. There is no entitlement to know what I do or do not think. I ran on what my wiki says and it hasn't changed since I ran. It says "I do vocalize my stance on certain items and events that concern the project and FOSS." I don't think there is anymore that needs to be stated.

I would have preferred you defended the Board or the Community with this same passion.

People speak up based on being attack. Anyone would do the same thing. People have different passions. Don't ask people to express the same passion for something as defending themselves from being attacked. It's not the same.

On Tue 2024-04-16, Richard Brown wrote:

However, under a model where minuted decisions are immediately followed by Board members individually expressing their opposition

This is simply not the case. Not in general, and not even here. Also I've read about "board decisions" and "board this" and "board that" which do not match my personal recollection and experience. Gerald

On 2024-04-16 14:05, Patrick Fitzgerald wrote:

...

If the only way of community has to understand the decisions of the Board is by attending a particular meeting at a particular time, then the Board is conducting itself in a way that inheriently disadvantages a wide number of members across the world. I do not agree with this practice. You are constructing a narrative that simply doesn't exist. I didn't suggest that at all. Was merely suggesting that you, and others, are free to attend the board meetings. We need more interest and involvement, not sniping.

You have 'interest and involvement' - you've seen a whole bunch of posts from a whooooooole bunch of folk on -Project Just because the involvement doesn't result in us turning up to a meeting, doesn't mean the community isn't engaged.

...

Else the Board is just going to have an echo-chamber of itself and a few who can afford to attend at the time that best suits the Board. Possibly a better use of your time would be to be more constructive is these kind of matters.

I wrote a nice long post explaining the problem as I see it, the severity of the problem and how much it impacts me as a community member, AND I even made TWO suggestions as to possible routes forward for the Board, the collective approach that I clearly preferred AND another which sadly required addressing individuals which has obviously now got some people, for the lack of a better term, clearly "butt hurt" But then again, if I didn't provide the second suggestion, I would have been accused of railroading the Board into a direction. And if I didn't provide the individual examples for the second suggestion, I would have been been accused of making unjustified noise. I know how this works, isn't my first, second, or third rodeo. Shooting at the messenger is part of progress. But I'm still convinced my efforts here are constructive. It's not like I'm calling for you all to give up and suggesting we need a totally different governance model.

...

The Board should have collectively owned that. All six of you.

I think that you'll find that we do take ownership, as a board, and it be discussed at the next meeting.

Awesome, looking forward to reading the minutes. I won't be attending the meeting.

The board needs more feedback, not less.

Agreed, but that also means the Board needs to be prepared to hear things they don't like, and/or don't agree with. But you still have to consider them..that's what you signed up for :)

I really don't want to add noise to the discussion. But I'm struggling to understand one particular point at Richard rationale. It's surely my fault, but... (please read until the end). On 4/16/24 1:19 PM, Richard Brown wrote:

[...] On 2024-04-16 12:04, Patrick Fitzgerald wrote:

...

Richard,

Calling 2 members of the board "empty chairs" is insulting and counter productive.

And yet both you and Doug were totally absent from the discussions till now. Discussions which your input could have been useful in.

So it's bad that Patrick and Doug has kept their individual mouths shut.

[...]

I think the best way forward is for the Board to collectively own it's decisions, even bad ones.

So, lets take the recent example.

The minutes made it clear, the Board decided [whatever]

The Board should have collectively owned that. All six of you.

Gerald, Neal, Gertjan, should all have kept their individual mouths shut or fully backed the decision to not act.

So it's bad that Gerald, Neal and Gertjan didn't kept their individual mounts shut. So do I get it right that you (Richard) are defending something like this? a) The board members should ideally keep the golden rule of defending the common board's position that has been minuted. Acting in a cohesive way and keeping their individual opinions for themselves. b) If a couple of board members break that rule and express their personal opinions, then ALL members are expected to do the same and engage in the public discussion as individuals. I believe many of us would agree on (a). I'm personally not so sure about (b). But probably I just misunderstood the whole thing, so sorry in advance for that. I just feel more people could have my same perception and could use some clarification. Thanks a ton! Cheers. -- Ancor González Sosa YaST Team at SUSE Software Solutions

On 4/16/24 3:47 PM, Richard Brown wrote:

[...] So I wanted to put an option b) on the table even if I don't like it. > I feel if I didn't propose at least two paths forward people would accuse me of not being constructive, being too demanding, being unfair, being unwilling to compromise, or some other colourful variation.

Ok. Your position is clear to me now. Thanks. But if you would accept some criticism, I would say your way of putting b) on the table initially was a bit harsher than actually needed. You didn't put it on the table, you thrown it on some people's toes. ;-)

[...]

Does that clear things up?

I think so. I don't necessarily agree with b) been a reasonably alternative to a), but I understand your rationale now. Cheers. -- Ancor González Sosa YaST Team at SUSE Software Solutions

Hi On 4/16/24 8:49 PM, Richard Brown wrote:

Replying in Plain Text, as required by the Project's Rules:

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Mailing_lists_subscription#Can_I_send_attac...

Please can you start doing the same?

The mailing list administrators (not myself) made it clear last time this was raised, that this is no longer the case and html emails are clearly no longer rejected by the list. They gave two main reasons for this from memory. Firstly unlike the old list software the current list software is capable of showing html emails correctly in the archive. Secondly it makes our mailing lists a more welcoming and friendly place for newer contributors who may not be aware of the differences between html and plain text email. As such the part of the wiki page that states html email will be blocked is clearly wrong and the last impression I got from the mailing list admins was that we shouldn't strongly discourage html email (but we shouldn't also encourage it). In a 5 minute search of my mailbox I couldn't find the post where they mentioned this so maybe it was off list or maybe part of my memory is also wrong. 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

On Tue 2024-04-16, Richard Brown wrote:

I strongly feel the Board have a responsibility to work for ALL the community, not just the exclusive community that attend Board Meetings.

Agreed. During my tenure (and Neal was instrumental in pushing this) we improved transparency and opened up board meetings for all members, and even the general public; this is a standing invitation, not an obligation.

If it is a policy of the openSUSE Board to treat issues raised in person with a higher priority or severity

The openSUSE Board has no such policy.

The minutes made it clear, the Board decided to not act on the reports of the endless nonsense in IRC

I am not aware of such a decision, and I do not see this in the minutes. (What many probably are not aware of, and what is not covered in the minutes, is that Simon has been IRC moderator for years and now focused on it again.)

Gerald, Gertjan, Neal, all undermined that Board decision by stating they supported the CoC, Moderation, etc.

There is no board decision in conflict with what I wrote.

I don't want a dysfunctional Board.

Nor do I. Nor do I want to be in a project with assumptions, allegations, and (unfounded) accusations galore that suck energy, time, and motivation of mine. In decades of free software and open source and a professional career none of my roles has been as painful and frustrating with a certain regularity as serving on the openSUSE Board. Gerald

On 4/17/24 10:50 AM, Richard Brown wrote:

On 2024-04-17 02:56, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

...

...

The minutes made it clear, the Board decided to not act on the reports of the endless nonsense in IRC

I am not aware of such a decision, and I do not see this in the minutes.

From “= Board Meeting Monday 2024-04-08 13:00 CEST =“

https://etherpad.opensuse.org/p/BoardMeeting

All Board Members were present

“==  Moderation == * IRC bridged to matrix, but not discord * Simon has been monitoring ... and found not need for moderation for the time being.”

The board had already chosen to act in the previous meeting by adding Shawn as an additional moderator to resolve this topic. This was a short follow up discussion as it was still on the agenda from the previous meeting. Where I simply stated I had not seen anything which was factually correct as due to technical reasons my laptop was offline over the weekend when the issues happened. Shawn only raised the fact there was issues related to one of the moderators with the board via a reply to the meeting minutes which obviously happened **After** this meeting. Once we were made aware of the details I started acting on this straight away in my capacity as a long term moderator informing the board in case they wanted to take further different behavior knowing that I could act straight away in this capacity whilst I knew members of the board were still sleeping. In practice the moderator in question was removed from the position and therefore i'm presuming the rest of the board saw the issue as resolved before they had any chance to reach a consensus on whether different action should happen. To date no one on the board has suggested the removal of moderation status from the individual in question should be over turned and they should be re instated. -- 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

On 4/17/24 12:03 PM, Attila Pinter wrote:

On Wednesday, April 17th, 2024 at 8:50 AM, Simon Lees wrote:

...

On 4/17/24 10:50 AM, Richard Brown wrote:

...

On 2024-04-17 02:56, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

...

...

The minutes made it clear, the Board decided to not act on the reports of the endless nonsense in IRC

I am not aware of such a decision, and I do not see this in the minutes.

From “= Board Meeting Monday 2024-04-08 13:00 CEST =“

https://etherpad.opensuse.org/p/BoardMeeting

All Board Members were present

“== Moderation == * IRC bridged to matrix, but not discord * Simon has been monitoring ... and found not need for moderation for the time being.”

The board had already chosen to act in the previous meeting by adding Shawn as an additional moderator to resolve this topic. This was a short follow up discussion as it was still on the agenda from the previous meeting. Where I simply stated I had not seen anything which was factually correct as due to technical reasons my laptop was offline over the weekend when the issues happened.

Shawn only raised the fact there was issues related to one of the moderators with the board via a reply to the meeting minutes which obviously happened After this meeting.

Once we were made aware of the details I started acting on this straight away in my capacity as a long term moderator informing the board in case they wanted to take further different behavior knowing that I could act straight away in this capacity whilst I knew members of the board were still sleeping.

In practice the moderator in question was removed from the position and therefore i'm presuming the rest of the board saw the issue as resolved before they had any chance to reach a consensus on whether different action should happen. To date no one on the board has suggested the removal of moderation status from the individual in question should be over turned and they should be re instated.

Could you please help me with setting the timeframes? Was this before/after/during the conversation under "Board meeting minutes 2024-02-26"?

Shawn was added as a moderator during the meeting on 2024-03-11 according to the minutes posted on this list. The minutes for the meeting on 2024-02-26 were posted out of order just before last week's board meeting. We also had a brief update in last week's board meeting where I again mentioned I hadn't seen anything new (As previously stated I missed stuff). Shawn's email reply to the 2024-02-26 topic and the following information came a few hours after our last board meeting. My initial response to Shawn's reply about the role and scope of #opensuse-chat came before I was aware of some of the chat there in the previous days, that was clearly more then some, "nonsense" and that clearly violated our CoC. Then as stated in my previous reply once Shawn provided the details of what I missed I started acting straight away. It seems likely that minutes coming out of order probably also helped contribute to some of the confusion around this issue. -- 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

On 4/17/24 1:17 PM, Attila Pinter wrote:

On Wednesday, April 17th, 2024 at 9:33 AM, Attila Pinter wrote:

...

On Wednesday, April 17th, 2024 at 8:50 AM, Simon Lees sflees@suse.de wrote:

...

On 4/17/24 10:50 AM, Richard Brown wrote:

...

On 2024-04-17 02:56, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

...

...

The minutes made it clear, the Board decided to not act on the reports of the endless nonsense in IRC

I am not aware of such a decision, and I do not see this in the minutes.

From “= Board Meeting Monday 2024-04-08 13:00 CEST =“

https://etherpad.opensuse.org/p/BoardMeeting

All Board Members were present

“== Moderation == * IRC bridged to matrix, but not discord * Simon has been monitoring ... and found not need for moderation for the time being.”

The board had already chosen to act in the previous meeting by adding Shawn as an additional moderator to resolve this topic. This was a short follow up discussion as it was still on the agenda from the previous meeting. Where I simply stated I had not seen anything which was factually correct as due to technical reasons my laptop was offline over the weekend when the issues happened.

Shawn only raised the fact there was issues related to one of the moderators with the board via a reply to the meeting minutes which obviously happened After this meeting.

Once we were made aware of the details I started acting on this straight away in my capacity as a long term moderator informing the board in case they wanted to take further different behavior knowing that I could act straight away in this capacity whilst I knew members of the board were still sleeping.

In practice the moderator in question was removed from the position and therefore i'm presuming the rest of the board saw the issue as resolved before they had any chance to reach a consensus on whether different action should happen. To date no one on the board has suggested the removal of moderation status from the individual in question should be over turned and they should be re instated.

Could you please help me with setting the timeframes? Was this before/after/during the conversation under "Board meeting minutes 2024-02-26"?

Just to clarify, things are a bit unclear for me in terms of order. So first the board was receiving reports about the lack of moderation on IRC. Simon started to monitor IRC as minuted under "Board meeting minutes 2024-02-26" (which was released over a month late, but that is beside the point...). What further confuses me is that Simon has been a "long term moderator on IRC", yet they had no idea about these problems.

There are two factors here, firstly I had been having issues with my IRC client which meant I hadn't personally been active on IRC for a round a month prior. Secondly unlike our other platforms where we have moderator teams per platform traditionally on irc going back 15+ years we have per channel moderation. So while I was appointed a moderator on #opensuse I never had my client setup to join #opensuse-chat, i'd join at times to discuss issues with people but as far as i'm aware since the updated CoC was added no one was actively moderating #opensuse-chat, in fact one thing we seemed to miss was that in the migration from freenode to libera.chat the people who used to have moderator permissions there did not have this restored. I did join #opensuse-chat again once complaints were raised about it specifically I don't know when that was but certainly the initial discussion didn't mention that channel specifically. One of the reasons I didn't rush to fix my laptop's irc client is that as irc has got quieter the number of people we've had issues with on #opensuse irc channel atleast had dropped to near zero. I don't believe i've had to take moderator action there for atleast a few years.

The Board then appointed Shawn to moderate IRC (2024-03-11?) ? This would further clarify the quality of moderation on IRC prior.

Unfortunately I missed that meeting for personal reasons so I can't comment on that directly.

With that we reach last week's conversation under "Board meeting minutes 2024-02-26" where Simon suggested that after monitoring the channels moderation is not required on IRC. Shawn voiced their disagreement with that statement pretty clearly...

https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/project@lists.opensuse.org/message/... https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/project@lists.opensuse.org/message/...

This is a miss understanding, I said "Minimal Moderation" not "No Moderation" those two things are vastly different. My point here was that unlike many other communication channels within the project it is a space where "Some Nonsense" has always been present and allowed. But if someone is violating the CoC then clearly action should be taken.

...

...

...

From “= Board Meeting Monday 2024-04-08 13:00 CEST =“

https://etherpad.opensuse.org/p/BoardMeeting

All Board Members were present

“== Moderation == * IRC bridged to matrix, but not discord * Simon has been monitoring ... and found not need for moderation for the time being.”

Just help me understand what is the point of having a mods-team if the Board wouldn't even listen to the one person who got appointed by them and instead side with someone who is part of the problem? And when the lid blows half of the Board publicly rolls all their support back, then one resigns, the other half is either sitting idly by, or try and defend their poor position...

I also don't think this is fair, as someone who has also been on the board you'd understand that often we deal with these issues in private rather then public. Once more details were provided to board@ action was taken quickly. Before that point the only details we as a board and I as an IRC moderator had were "#openSUSE has been relatively quiet and well-behaved the last week or two, #openSUSE-chat is still much of the same, partially due to one of the perpetrators still being a ChanOp, so it's a little hard to moderate." As you hopefully understand this on its own is not enough detail for the board to take action on, but it is enough for us to follow up further. I asked for specific details as part of the thread and once these were provided as previously mentioned I took action as a fellow IRC moderator before the board had time to collectively take action. As a final note, had I seen what Shawn had seen, my response in https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/project@lists.opensuse.org/message/... Would have been vastly different. It is now clear that Shawn had seen clear CoC violations that I had not and I can only presume that he believed I already had seen them and was suggesting they weren't worth moderation action. -- 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

On 4/17/24 4:45 PM, Richard Brown wrote:

On 2024-04-17 06:54, Simon Lees wrote:

...

Secondly unlike our other platforms where we have moderator teams per platform traditionally on irc going back 15+ years we have per channel moderation. So while I was appointed a moderator on #opensuse I never had my client setup to join #opensuse-chat, i'd join at times to discuss issues with people but as far as i'm aware since the updated CoC was added no one was actively moderating #opensuse-chat, in fact one thing we seemed to miss was that in the migration from freenode to libera.chat the people who used to have moderator permissions there did not have this restored. I did join #opensuse-chat again once complaints were raised about it specifically I don't know when that was but certainly the initial discussion didn't mention that channel specifically.

Simon, I am afraid I cannot agree with the recollection of events as you describe them above. During the migration to LiberaChat, the folk migrating the various #opensuse channels gave Op rights (+o) directly to people who requested it.

In the case of #opensuse-chat, I granted the following person operator privileges when they requested it on May 27 12:52:12 2021

Simotek

This is your IRC Nick, is it not? I don't think this is a Jia Tan situation

I did not grant +o flags to anyone else on #opensuse-chat I ONLY granted +o flags when people explicitly asked me for them, as I had no record of who moderated our Freenode channels

It just isn't true that #opensuse-chat didn't have a moderator..it did. It was you. Since we moved to Libera.

Thanks for the info, I do think I remember asking for it as a after thought for backup safety in case someone reported something, but I never at any point volunteered to sit in that channel and moderate it day to day. Traditionally that channel had too much volume for me to commit to and I believed #opensuse was far more important to the general community. When I checked the channel access list the other day, Shawn was the only person with +o set other then the founders, so I presumed that I wasn't granted access there given I still have +o in #opensuse. So in this case it seems like at some point everyone who you initially set as having +o on #opensuse-chat has had that flag removed at some point. For what its worth while I did have the +o flag set there no one directly contacted me with a complaint about anyone else's behavior. -- 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

On 2024-04-17 09:45, Simon Lees wrote:

On 4/17/24 4:45 PM, Richard Brown wrote:

...

On 2024-04-17 06:54, Simon Lees wrote:

- 32 instances of the word 'fuck' - mostly by previously mentioned demoted op and the person you suggested should become an IRC Op on April 12 2024 in your discussions in that channel

I believe the word I used was "Keep" which doesn't suggest promoting to an Op, I was acting on memory and Shawn's comment of an Op causing issues and believed they had already had Op status there, it was only slightly later that I googled how to check the access lists and discovered they were only still an Op on the main channel.

Which after not being able to address the complaints raised I then requested that you as a founder remove the +o status there as I was unable to.

I am talking about 2 different people Person 1 - was an Op, yes you spoke to them and gave them an opportunity to "Keep" that on Apr 11 Person 2 - was not an Op, and you spoke to them on Apr 12 suggesting they could/should be because they were "atleast someone who I remember was a regular" (on Freenode) I'd also share your recollection that they are a regular on IRC, but given their choice of language in #opensuse-chat I would never have suggested they would be a good individual to be trusted with enforcing our CoC

Am 17.04.24 um 03:20 schrieb Richard Brown:

On 2024-04-17 02:56, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

...

...

The minutes made it clear, the Board decided to not act on the reports of the endless nonsense in IRC

I am not aware of such a decision, and I do not see this in the minutes.

From “= Board Meeting Monday 2024-04-08 13:00 CEST =“

https://etherpad.opensuse.org/p/BoardMeeting

All Board Members were present

“==  Moderation == * IRC bridged to matrix, but not discord * Simon has been monitoring ... and found not need for moderation for the time being.”

And that's an observation "for the time being", not a "Board decision". Richard, we know that you know how to read. So this time you clearly showed that you are twisting the facts. Almost always you hide this very well, profiting from your state as a native english speaker so that many readers of your text just get a bad feeling but cannot really quantify what is bad about it. This time you gave a short and precise "test case" that shows your intent clearly. -- Stefan Seyfried "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman