Simon Lees wrote:

My aim is to have a finalized version ready on the 8th of December (A week before voting starts) i'd welcome anyone and everyone's feedback anytime before then.

Why this urgency, it sounds like something that could easily be brought up after the current elections ? -- Per Jessen, Zürich (2.5°C) Member, openSUSE Heroes

On 11/25/20 6:08 PM, jdd@dodin.org wrote:

Le 25/11/2020 à 07:17, Simon Lees a écrit :

...

     10 individual members may contact the election officials requesting

but how are designated/elected the election officials?

The election officials have a designated contact email address where they can be contacted. Generally a few weeks before the election process starts the chairman will contact them and confirm that they are still ok to run the election and if not (or if they all inform the board sometime during the year they'd like to step down) the chairman will call for new volunteers.

...

however the current board can run in the election so a different 50% of the community could still reinstate them.

this have to be made clear: in such circumstance the old board can be candidate (individually)

Yep this was our interpretation of the current election rules, if anyone believes the rules are not clear enough on this issue feel free to propose an additional line. (Given it is the current status quo I didn't feel the need to address it). -- 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

Fellow Geekos, Speaking as an election official, the hardest parts of the "Forced re-election" affair was: * Not having any guidelines in the rules as to how a Forced re-election can be triggered, which is what Simon's suggestion is trying to address. * No guidelines as to how  20% is to be counted. - This led to us having to use a voting tool Helios as a petition tool which in turn caused a lot of confusion, especially as we had to have an election for a board resignation anyway. So there is definitely some thinking to be done. I personally like Simon's idea but would prefer rather than a fixed number like 10 we express it as a percentage of the membership. Taking approximately 500 members then 20% = 100 and 10 = 2%. I would feel 3 to 4% would be a better indication of real support. Also if we get the required number how is the 20% to be measured. At the moment the only tool we have is another petition, using Helios! In my mind I feel the ultimate solution would be some form of petition tool so members themselves can set up a petition, only open to members, and directly garner the 20%. This can then be vetted by the election officials and then addressed accordingly. The same tool could also be used to direct the direction of the project itself. That said there would have to be appropriate check and balances in the system to ensure it does not get "hijacked". Just some feedback for discussion... Cheers, Ariez ajv@opensuse.org On 25/11/2020 14:17, Simon Lees wrote:

Hi All,

Under "by a vote of the membership where 2/3 or more of the openSUSE members participating in the vote approve it. " I would like to propose an amendment to the Board Election rules (Note I rather then the board).

I believe that the events in the last year have shown a weakness in at least one part of the rules. With the upcoming regular election I believe this is as good a time as any to address this change.

The specific section I would like to modify is the following, I know others have spoken about making changes to some larger sections at some point but I believe this change is small and manageable in the current timeframe so I'd like to keep the discussions in this thread around this topic which is:

Forced re-election: If 20 per cent or more of the openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats.

I believe that this is a very worth while concept, however the current phrasing has left enough ambiguity that in practice it was hard to organise cleanly. My personal view is that the people who authored this text expected that should this ever be needed that some form of basic petition or even just +1's to a mailing list thread would be done.

In practice it was decided that this would be too hard to verify and had some privacy concerns and as such the election officials decided to utilize our voting system which was a reasonable way to handle the situation under the current wording. However it now leaves us in a position where one or two people can call for such a vote that will cripple the project for several weeks. I don't believe this was the intent of the original wording as such I am proposing an alternative, this is still in draft form so I am happy to hear other peoples amendments and suggestions.

Forced re-election: 10 individual members may contact the election officials requesting a petition of non confidence in the board. If 20 per cent or more openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats.

The 10 is a number that I felt is reasonable i'd be open to going slightly up and down, its a bit of a balance if 20% of members are interested getting 10 to contact the election officials should be easy. At the same time it should be reasonably easy for election officials to verify 10 members by checking the membership list and sending an email to there registered email address asking for confirmation they sent the original email.

There was also some questions around the 20% rather then a 50% majority, My view is to leave this as is, if 20% of people call for a forced election it means there is quite some disagreement in the community, however the current board can run in the election so a different 50% of the community could still reinstate them.

My aim is to have a finalized version ready on the 8th of December (A week before voting starts) i'd welcome anyone and everyone's feedback anytime before then.

Cheers

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Am 25. November 2020 10:02:27 schrieb "jdd@dodin.org" :

I don't mean how to contact them, but who are them...

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election#Election_Committee

IMHO there are too many designated people around (election, membership), this is not sane.

Really? I don't think so. Three election officials are the bare minimum. And membership officials are a different group so there are different people necessary. Iirc they are a quite loose handful of people, actively being five or so. Which is nothing insane IMHO but necessary as well. All of the official people are doing other stuff (development, packaging etc.) and volunteer for their official duties on top. So I thinks it's fair to keep the workload per capita as low as possible. Cheers, vinz.

Le mercredi 25 novembre 2020 à 17:24 +0800, Ariez Vachha a écrit :

So there is definitely some thinking to be done. I personally like Simon's idea but would prefer rather than a fixed number like 10 we express it as a percentage of the membership. Taking approximately 500 members then 20% = 100 and 10 = 2%. I would feel 3 to 4% would be a better indication of real support.

FWIW, I believe that anything expressed as a percentage (including the 20% rule that we already have) is broken right now as, to my knowledge, inactive members are still counted in the total members, while they will not vote. We should only consider a list of active members for such percentages. Or are we already asking members to move to "Members Emeritus" when no activity is recorded? Cheers, Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.

Dne středa 25. listopadu 2020 10:39:59 CET, Ariez Vachha napsal(a):

Even as an election official the mechanics of my appointment are unknown to me, I just see it as an honour to serve the community / project I am passionate about.

I think You do great job, I'd just agree that the process of entering as well as leaving, selection procedure, etc. should be formally described in rules. -- Vojtěch Zeisek https://trapa.cz/ Komunita openSUSE GNU/Linuxu Community of the openSUSE GNU/Linux https://www.opensuse.org/

Am Mittwoch, 25. November 2020, 11:06:56 CET schrieb Vojtěch Zeisek:

Dne středa 25. listopadu 2020 10:39:59 CET, Ariez Vachha napsal(a):

I think You do great job, I'd just agree that the process of entering as well as leaving, selection procedure, etc. should be formally described in rules.

We had this topic on the agenda of the board session yesterday. Most of this is already in the election rules. Simon volunteered to clarify and link into the respective wiki pages. (Spoiler alert for the coming meeting minutes :-) Cheers Axel

On 11/25/20 8:12 PM, Vincent Untz wrote:

Le mercredi 25 novembre 2020 à 17:24 +0800, Ariez Vachha a écrit :

...

So there is definitely some thinking to be done. I personally like Simon's idea but would prefer rather than a fixed number like 10 we express it as a percentage of the membership. Taking approximately 500 members then 20% = 100 and 10 = 2%. I would feel 3 to 4% would be a better indication of real support.

FWIW, I believe that anything expressed as a percentage (including the 20% rule that we already have) is broken right now as, to my knowledge, inactive members are still counted in the total members, while they will not vote. We should only consider a list of active members for such percentages.

Or are we already asking members to move to "Members Emeritus" when no activity is recorded?

4-5 years ago someone wrote a script that went through obs, github, mailing lists etc and sent everyone it didn't detect an email asking if they still wished to be a member, there was some false positives and some less active contributors who still wished to be members but that was how most if not all the inactive members were moved. That dropped us back down to around 400 members from which it has increased again, most significantly around the name vote. Maybe its around time that we did similar again in the new year after this election, I don't know who was responsible for the script used and how easy it is to find but I believe it was a significant amount of effort. The reason I went for 10 rather then 2% etc is because my main concern was not allowing one or a handful of people trigger the clause, In the context of triggering the creation of a petition I don't see a huge difference between 8 and 25 people, so I went with a number that doesn't create too much work more work then can be avoided for the election officials. In the end this extra step is a bit of a compromise, in an ideal world there would be some way for the 20% to trigger an election without outside help but I can't see a way of making that happen. -- 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

Am 25.11.20 um 13:27 schrieb jdd@dodin.org:

the problem is not the number of people, but the fact they are designated (by whom?)

See my other reply to this thread: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_rules#Election_Committee vinz.

Am 25.11.20 um 13:44 schrieb jdd@dodin.org:

...

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_rules#Election_Committee

I can't read this (no such title)

Then please try this: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_rules And scroll down to the section "Election Committee". Or just use the wiki search. vinz.

On Wed, 2020-11-25 at 15:41 +0100, jdd@dodin.org wrote:

Le 25/11/2020 à 14:34, Vinzenz Vietzke a écrit :

...

And scroll down to the section "Election Committee". Or just use the wiki search.

oh, yes "appointed by the board"

that's the problem :-(

do you imagine President Trump appointing the US election board?

He does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Election_Commission "The commission consists of six members appointed by the president" -- Richard Brown Linux Distribution Engineer - Future Technology Team    Phone +4991174053-361 SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH,  Maxfeldstr. 5,  D-90409 Nuernberg (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Geschäftsführer: Felix Imendörffer

* Vincent Untz [11-25-20 04:45]:

Le mercredi 25 novembre 2020 à 17:24 +0800, Ariez Vachha a écrit :

...

So there is definitely some thinking to be done. I personally like Simon's idea but would prefer rather than a fixed number like 10 we express it as a percentage of the membership. Taking approximately 500 members then 20% = 100 and 10 = 2%. I would feel 3 to 4% would be a better indication of real support.

FWIW, I believe that anything expressed as a percentage (including the 20% rule that we already have) is broken right now as, to my knowledge, inactive members are still counted in the total members, while they will not vote. We should only consider a list of active members for such percentages.

a strict definition of "active" vs "inactive" is necessary. -- (paka)Patrick Shanahan Plainfield, Indiana, USA @ptilopteri http://en.opensuse.org openSUSE Community Member facebook/ptilopteri Photos: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/piwigo paka @ IRCnet freenode

Le 25/11/2020 à 16:37, Martin Schröder a écrit :

...

"The commission consists of six members appointed by the president" "and confirmed by the Senate"

Now what shall be our Senate?

oh, yes. all members? on the foundation project (still actual?), there could be a subset of the members, may be elected, or by any other mean (volunteers sorted by membership date?) by the way this could be done later, after the present board election jdd -- http://dodin.org

Am Mi, 25. Nov, 2020 um 5:00 P. M. schrieb Vinzenz Vietzke :

Am 25.11.20 um 16:44 schrieb jdd@dodin.org:

...

oh, yes. all members?

Well, there's the problem: We need election officials for running elections. But who should be the election officials for the election of election officials? And how do we vote in the election for the election officials without having election officials setting up the election officials election voting system?

All in all I would not want to see such an spree of votings and elections if there is no actual incident forcing us to so.

I was gonna suggest membership officials as a body that could appoint election officials, but I think then we would need the members to vote for membership officials, which is kinda dangerous considering membership is granted by them, so they could technically only accept membership requests from people that favoured them, not good ;) LCP [Stasiek] https://lcp.world

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 17:05:57 +0100 Stasiek Michalski wrote:

Am Mi, 25. Nov, 2020 um 5:00 P. M. schrieb Vinzenz Vietzke :

...

Am 25.11.20 um 16:44 schrieb jdd@dodin.org:

...

oh, yes. all members?

Well, there's the problem: We need election officials for running elections. But who should be the election officials for the election of election officials? And how do we vote in the election for the election officials without having election officials setting up the election officials election voting system?

All in all I would not want to see such an spree of votings and elections if there is no actual incident forcing us to so.

I was gonna suggest membership officials as a body that could appoint election officials, but I think then we would need the members to vote for membership officials, which is kinda dangerous considering membership is granted by them, so they could technically only accept membership requests from people that favoured them, not good ;)

Having the membership officials doing that to me seems less appropriate considering that they are also appointed by the board. It's an unecessary redundancy in my opinion. However beacause the board is already elected through a vote of the membership, I think we can accept and trust this "elected" body to appoint the next Election Committee. I don't see particular reasons to change this :). -- Maurizio Galli (m4u9) Xfce Team https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Xfce

On 11/24/20 10:17 PM, Simon Lees wrote:

Hi All,

Under "by a vote of the membership where 2/3 or more of the openSUSE members participating in the vote approve it. " I would like to propose an amendment to the Board Election rules (Note I rather then the board).

I believe that the events in the last year have shown a weakness in at least one part of the rules. With the upcoming regular election I believe this is as good a time as any to address this change.

The specific section I would like to modify is the following, I know others have spoken about making changes to some larger sections at some point but I believe this change is small and manageable in the current timeframe so I'd like to keep the discussions in this thread around this topic which is:

Forced re-election: If 20 per cent or more of the openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats.

I believe that this is a very worth while concept, however the current phrasing has left enough ambiguity that in practice it was hard to organise cleanly. My personal view is that the people who authored this text expected that should this ever be needed that some form of basic petition or even just +1's to a mailing list thread would be done.

In practice it was decided that this would be too hard to verify and had some privacy concerns and as such the election officials decided to utilize our voting system which was a reasonable way to handle the situation under the current wording. However it now leaves us in a position where one or two people can call for such a vote that will cripple the project for several weeks. I don't believe this was the intent of the original wording as such I am proposing an alternative, this is still in draft form so I am happy to hear other peoples amendments and suggestions.

Forced re-election: 10 individual members may contact the election officials requesting a petition of non confidence in the board. If 20 per cent or more openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats.

The 10 is a number that I felt is reasonable i'd be open to going slightly up and down, its a bit of a balance if 20% of members are interested getting 10 to contact the election officials should be easy. At the same time it should be reasonably easy for election officials to verify 10 members by checking the membership list and sending an email to there registered email address asking for confirmation they sent the original email.

There was also some questions around the 20% rather then a 50% majority, My view is to leave this as is, if 20% of people call for a forced election it means there is quite some disagreement in the community, however the current board can run in the election so a different 50% of the community could still reinstate them.

My aim is to have a finalized version ready on the 8th of December (A week before voting starts) i'd welcome anyone and everyone's feedback anytime before then.

This is something I would eagerly support. -- -Gerry Makaro Fraser-Bell on Github

On 11/26/20 1:34 AM, Patrick Shanahan wrote:

* Vincent Untz [11-25-20 04:45]:

...

Le mercredi 25 novembre 2020 à 17:24 +0800, Ariez Vachha a écrit :

...

So there is definitely some thinking to be done. I personally like Simon's idea but would prefer rather than a fixed number like 10 we express it as a percentage of the membership. Taking approximately 500 members then 20% = 100 and 10 = 2%. I would feel 3 to 4% would be a better indication of real support.

FWIW, I believe that anything expressed as a percentage (including the 20% rule that we already have) is broken right now as, to my knowledge, inactive members are still counted in the total members, while they will not vote. We should only consider a list of active members for such percentages.

a strict definition of "active" vs "inactive" is necessary.

The current definition of active is anyone on the membership list, in the past we have used other methods to clean up the membership list. In my opinion its probably better to address cleaning up the membership list separately as we have in the past. -- 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 11/26/20 3:23 AM, Maurizio Galli wrote:

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 17:05:57 +0100 Stasiek Michalski wrote:

...

Am Mi, 25. Nov, 2020 um 5:00 P. M. schrieb Vinzenz Vietzke :

...

Am 25.11.20 um 16:44 schrieb jdd@dodin.org:

...

oh, yes. all members?

Well, there's the problem: We need election officials for running elections. But who should be the election officials for the election of election officials? And how do we vote in the election for the election officials without having election officials setting up the election officials election voting system?

All in all I would not want to see such an spree of votings and elections if there is no actual incident forcing us to so.

I was gonna suggest membership officials as a body that could appoint election officials, but I think then we would need the members to vote for membership officials, which is kinda dangerous considering membership is granted by them, so they could technically only accept membership requests from people that favoured them, not good ;)

Having the membership officials doing that to me seems less appropriate considering that they are also appointed by the board. It's an unecessary redundancy in my opinion.

However beacause the board is already elected through a vote of the membership, I think we can accept and trust this "elected" body to appoint the next Election Committee. I don't see particular reasons to change this :).

Yeah that is kinda my thought as well, I think that this is something that could be discussed independently of this change, certainly if its something that is important to a significant part of the community i'd probably support it. However i'm not really passionate enough about it to write a proposal and push it. As the board we will soon be working on merging the rules around the membership officials into the same document as the board election rules which will make it easier for someone to then draft proposed changes in this area. 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 11/26/20 2:07 AM, Martin Schröder wrote:

Am Mi., 25. Nov. 2020 um 15:58 Uhr schrieb Richard Brown :

...

On Wed, 2020-11-25 at 15:41 +0100, jdd@dodin.org wrote:

...

do you imagine President Trump appointing the US election board?

He does

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Election_Commission

"The commission consists of six members appointed by the president" "and confirmed by the Senate"

Now what shall be our Senate?

Well our process is much more along the lines of people nominate themselves for the role and the board plays the role of the senate in confirming there appointment. -- 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

Op donderdag 26 november 2020 02:43:17 CET schreef Patrick Shanahan:

...

The current definition of active is anyone on the membership list, in the past we have used other methods to clean up the membership list. In my opinion its probably better to address cleaning up the membership list separately as we have in the past.

[-- Error: unable to create PGP subprocess! --]

if that is the definition of active, you have absolutely no criteria for removing "inactive" members, ie: cleaning up the membership list.

"active" must be defined, not just understood.

Should we consider this as coming from volunteer #1 putting himself up for doing this? -- Gertjan Lettink a.k.a. Knurpht openSUSE Forums Team

Le jeudi 26 novembre 2020 à 13:39 +1030, Simon Lees a écrit :

Again, if there was enough concern around this we could add a rule that every X years inactive members are asked whether they still wish to be members but this would be hard to write it would be also hard to enforce (what do you do to a board that runs out of time or forgets to do such a clean up). So in my opinion given we ended up with a process that works without needing to create a rule around it I tend to be in favor of not explicitly adding it. Again unless a significant group of the membership expressed concern that we don't have a rule covering it.

Assuming you're referring to the process that was used to trim the membership list from 600 to 400, it may be working but it's not actively used. I'll phrase my concern again: if we have a rule saying that "20% of the membership is required for something", then it does matter a lot that we keep the list of members up-to-date: there's a huge difference between 20% of 600 and 20% of 400. And to be clear: this is independent of the next elections, and only loosely related to the change you're proposing -- I don't intend my comment to block any of these two things. But I strongly believe this should be addressed. Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.

* Simon Lees [11-26-20 06:39]:

On 11/26/20 6:15 PM, Vincent Untz wrote:

...

Le jeudi 26 novembre 2020 à 13:39 +1030, Simon Lees a écrit :

...

Again, if there was enough concern around this we could add a rule that every X years inactive members are asked whether they still wish to be members but this would be hard to write it would be also hard to enforce (what do you do to a board that runs out of time or forgets to do such a clean up). So in my opinion given we ended up with a process that works without needing to create a rule around it I tend to be in favor of not explicitly adding it. Again unless a significant group of the membership expressed concern that we don't have a rule covering it.

Assuming you're referring to the process that was used to trim the membership list from 600 to 400, it may be working but it's not actively used.

I'll phrase my concern again: if we have a rule saying that "20% of the membership is required for something", then it does matter a lot that we keep the list of members up-to-date: there's a huge difference between 20% of 600 and 20% of 400.

And to be clear: this is independent of the next elections, and only loosely related to the change you're proposing -- I don't intend my comment to block any of these two things. But I strongly believe this should be addressed.

Yeah for me the question is whether we address this "formally" by modifying the rules, or "informally" by running that previous process slightly more regularly. The 600 -> 400 was from the start of the project till 2016, I think once every 4-5 years is probably reasonable, otherwise we start to bug the false positives too much.

[-- Error: unable to create PGP subprocess! --] if you intend to continue in that manner, anyone attempting to publicly define "inactive" is kicking a dead horse. -- (paka)Patrick Shanahan Plainfield, Indiana, USA @ptilopteri http://en.opensuse.org openSUSE Community Member facebook/ptilopteri Photos: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/piwigo paka @ IRCnet freenode

Hello, Am Mittwoch, 25. November 2020, 07:17:15 CET schrieb Simon Lees:

I believe that the events in the last year have shown a weakness in at least one part of the rules.

Forced re-election: If 20 per cent or more of the openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats.

I believe that this is a very worth while concept, however the current phrasing has left enough ambiguity that in practice it was hard to organise cleanly. My personal view is that the people who authored this text expected that should this ever be needed that some form of basic petition or even just +1's to a mailing list thread would be done.

If I had to guess, I'd say they added the rule "because you need such a rule", and never expected that there would be a need to actually trigger that rule (which also means they didn't care about technical details).

In practice it was decided that this would be too hard to verify and had some privacy concerns and as such the election officials decided to utilize our voting system which was a reasonable way to handle the situation under the current wording.

I'd drop the "under the current wording" part - the way the voting was done was reasonable, independent of the wording.

However it now leaves us in a position where one or two people can call for such a vote that will cripple the project for several weeks.

You are trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist ;-) We were in this position since openSUSE exists. In all the years, we had exactly one call for a non-confidence vote, and that was for good reasons. Nobody ever abused this rule, and given the possible damage someone could do to him-/herself, I expect that nobody will ever abuse this rule to "troll" or "just for fun". Besides that, I don't see how that would "cripple the project for several weeks". Most parts of the project will continue as usual. The only affected area are board-related things like elections and the board itsself. I'd hope that the board doesn't do "big" decisions during a running non-confidence vote (unless they are really urgent), but that's just a personal expectation and nothing our rules state. And finally, since we now have a known-good way to handle a non- confidence vote, it will (if we ever need it again) be handled much faster. This doesn't mean that your proposal is terribly bad, however I think it is superfluous.

I don't believe this was the intent of the original wording as such I am proposing an alternative, this is still in draft form so I am happy to hear other peoples amendments and suggestions.

Forced re-election: 10 individual members may contact the election officials requesting a petition of non confidence in the board. If 20 per cent or more openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats.

The 10 is a number that I felt is reasonable i'd be open to going slightly up and down, its a bit of a balance if 20% of members are interested getting 10 to contact the election officials should be easy. At the same time it should be reasonably easy for election officials to verify 10 members by checking the membership list and sending an email to there registered email address asking for confirmation they sent the original email.

Your main goal is to prevent abuse of the rule, right? For that, I'd say that even 3 members would be enough, and 5 would be more than enough. Note that your proposal means 10 members need to half-publicly *) state that they want a forced re-election, and this is harder than it sounds for the privacy reasons discussed earlier. *) In theory, the election officials could leak the list of people who sent them a mail. Or one of the admins could check the mail log for people who mailed the election officials recently and "guess" the content. To make it clear: This is not meant as distrust in the election officials or the admins, but it's a case where I'm thinking about "what could happen in worst case?" - and data that doesn't exist can't leak ;-)

There was also some questions around the 20% rather then a 50% majority, My view is to leave this as is, if 20% of people call for a forced election it means there is quite some disagreement in the community, however the current board can run in the election so a different 50% of the community could still reinstate them.

IIRC (correct me if I'm wrong) some months ago your opinion was that in case of a forced re-election, the current board members wouldn't be able to run. I'm not sure if I mis-remember or if you changed your mind, but let me explain why I don't like your view: If the board kicks out one of the board members, this person is not allowed to run in the forced re-election, even if that board action was the reason for the non-confidence vote. Therefore it would only be fair to apply the same rule if 20% of the members kick out the whole board. An alternative might be to change the rules so that "$person isn't allowed to run" does not apply to forced re-elections. (As a sidenote, and independent on the rules - if I'd be part of a kicked-out board, I'm quite sure I wouldn't run again.) Regards, Christian Boltz -- Ich bezweifle, dass jeder 1984 gelesen hat. Denn dann wüsten die Kommentatoren, dass das Gros der Bürger gar nicht überwacht, sondern einfach nur verdummt wurde. Privatfernsehen wurde übrigens in Deutschland zum 1. Januar 1984 eingeführt. [Peter Brülls zu http://blog.koehntopp.de/archives/3237-Kleine-Kinder-spielen-verstecken.html]

Hi, I agree with the overall idea of having real member count figures. Keeping them high artificially is nothing good, both for community processes and the impression gives to anyone. Am 28.11.20 um 00:07 schrieb Christian Boltz:

This makes defining inactive members easy: - no visible actions on mailinglists, bugzilla etc. (detectable by the script, if we continue to use it) - no answer to the mail asking if he/she wants to stay a member - having an outdated, undeliverable mail address as target of the @opensuse.org address so that the mail asking if he/she wants to stay a member can't be delivered

Actually undeliverable mails might be the biggest risk to loose membership - for example, last time I checked, about 10 members still had their @novell.com address listed. And that's just the obvious and very visible part of non-deliverable mail addresses.

I'd run these steps in sequence to strain out definitely inactive members step by step: 1) check for activity within the past 12 months by script 2) contact via email @opensuse.org (and the one it's pointing to directly) 3) check connect-o-o profile for other ways to contact 4) do a quick web search The latter two are optional and mostly depend on how many inactive members are left over after 1) and 2). As a side note: Keeping your member's roster in order is desired for associations under German law, like political parties or the e.V. Without having checked I assume there's something similar for foundations. We'd be doing some fundamental work with the regular cleanup, so to say. vinz.

Modifying the "Petition of no confidence article". Sounds good.

Your proposal: """ Forced re-election: 10 individual members may contact the election officials requesting a petition of non confidence in the board. If 20 per cent or more openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats. """ For my understanding: do you see your reformulation as equivalent to the following? """ Petition of No Confidence: When the Board Elections are not running, 10 openSUSE members may contact the Election Committee to request a petition of non confidence. The Election Committee then sees to organize a community-wide vote on the petition. The petition is accepted if the vote results in 20 per cent of Yes. If the petition is accepted, the Board is dismissed immediately and the Election Committee organizes a new election to be held no longer than < n weeks > after the vote. """ If you had in mind something different, which are the differences which would make you prefer your version?

Best, Adrien

On 12/11/20 4:14 PM, Simon Lees wrote:

Given there was reasonable support for this idea, regardless of other changes we eventually make to the election rules I am requesting that you add a vote on the following upcoming topic.

Should the Election Rules be Ammended Such that

Forced re-election: 10 individual members may contact the election officials requesting they run a petition of non confidence in the board. If 20 per cent or more openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats.

To help offset ambiguity, I would actually reword part of that to "If the petition results in 20 per cent or more ..." But, I might try to make that instead of 20% of openSUSE Members, to instead "if 20% of the petition votes". Otherwise, it still leaves an ambiguity that might rear its ugly head again someday. Best for this recall/non-confidence section to eliminate any possibilities of ambiguity, since it is really a section with Major impact on the Community and Project. -- -Gerry Makaro openSUSE Member Fraser-Bell on Github

On 12/12/20 10:48 PM, Adrien Glauser wrote:

...

Modifying the "Petition of no confidence article". Sounds good.

...

Your proposal: """ Forced re-election: 10 individual members may contact the election officials requesting a petition of non confidence in the board. If 20 per cent or more openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats. """ For my understanding: do you see your reformulation as equivalent to the following? """ Petition of No Confidence: When the Board Elections are not running, 10 openSUSE members may contact the Election Committee to request a petition of non confidence. The Election Committee then sees to organize a community-wide vote on the petition. The petition is accepted if the vote results in 20 per cent of Yes. If the petition is accepted, the Board is dismissed immediately and the Election Committee organizes a new election to be held no longer than < n weeks > after the vote. """ If you had in mind something different, which are the differences which would make you prefer your version?

What you wrote reflects what I had in mind, however the reason I prefer my version is I intentionally wanted to keep the differences as small as possible to make the functional changes as clear as possible otherwise I would have also cleaned up the other sentences a bit better. One of the main factors in deciding to take this approach is that the board has given its in principle support to using its 2/3rds majority to make non functional changes that clear up the wording so if the vote is successful then i'd change the wording to something like your proposal at the same time as going through the rest of the document to make it clearer in order to keep uniformity etc. -- 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

Okay :)

On 12/14/20 2:27 AM, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

On Sat 2020-12-12, Adrien Glauser wrote:

...

If the petition is accepted, the Board is dismissed immediately and the Election Committee organizes a new election to be held no longer than < n weeks > after the vote.

This is quite a change. The project would be without a board for some two months then.

Who is going to carry on their responsibilities? The chair alone??

(This is all the more relevant if you are looking towards a foundation.)

Yes, agreed, this would be disruptive and damaging. Board should step down *after* the election, but LONG ENOUGH AFTER to hand over the reins and help the newly elected Board get up to speed. Of course, in such a situation, it is likely not all the outgoing Board Members will be happy to remain after the non-confidence petition if the petition is successful. -- -Gerry Makaro openSUSE Member Fraser-Bell on Github

Le 15/12/2020 à 12:22, Adrien Glauser a écrit : f the vote results in 20 per cent of Yes. 20% of what? jdd -- http://dodin.org

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 3:28 PM Adrien Glauser wrote:

...

20 of what participants. I had in mind those in the oS community with voting rights. You think that should be made more precise?

If 20% of total members are required and not just vote participants, we certainly need to do some cleaning among inactive members...

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Sorry, to make this crystal clear, the draft I've sketched makes the following presuppositions: - vote passes just in case +20% of those who participate say Yay - x can participante just in case x has voting rights Le mardi 15 décembre 2020, 15:30:52 CET Mark Stopka a écrit :

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 3:28 PM Adrien Glauser wrote:

...

...

20 of what participants. I had in mind those in the oS community with voting rights. You think that should be made more precise?

If 20% of total members are required and not just vote participants, we certainly need to do some cleaning among inactive members...

...

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On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 3:36 PM Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:

Dne úterý 15. prosince 2020 15:28:39 CET, Adrien Glauser napsal(a):

...

...

20 of what

participants.

Total members? This is serious act and shouldn't be driven "just" by small active (loud) group.

It is also serious enough so that there should be a high participation rate and if there is not, there certainly is "something wrong" with the project, I would support an increase of Yay threshold, but not let large inactive (quiet) groups block something as serious.

-- Vojtěch Zeisek https://trapa.cz/

Komunita openSUSE GNU/Linuxu Community of the openSUSE GNU/Linux https://www.opensuse.org/ _______________________________________________ openSUSE Project mailing list -- project@lists.opensuse.org To unsubscribe, email project-leave@lists.opensuse.org List Netiquette: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Mailing_list_netiquette List Archives: https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/project@lists.opensuse.org

Dne úterý 15. prosince 2020 15:40:42 CET jste napsal(a):

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 3:36 PM Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:

...

Dne úterý 15. prosince 2020 15:28:39 CET, Adrien Glauser napsal(a):

...

...

20 of what

participants.

Total members? This is serious act and shouldn't be driven "just" by small active (loud) group.

It is also serious enough so that there should be a high participation rate and if there is not, there certainly is "something wrong" with the project, I would support an increase of Yay threshold, but not let large inactive (quiet) groups block something as serious.

At least X% of total members must vote and at least Y% of the voters must agree? Where X can be something like 50? And Y something like 20-50? See that 50% out of 50% is 25% of the total. Is this enough to replace Board? -- Vojtěch Zeisek https://trapa.cz/ Komunita openSUSE GNU/Linuxu Community of the openSUSE GNU/Linux https://www.opensuse.org/

On Tue 2020-12-15, Adrien Glauser wrote:

Sorry, to make this crystal clear, the draft I've sketched makes the following presuppositions: - vote passes just in case +20% of those who participate say Yay - x can participante just in case x has voting rights

In that case the draft is quite different from the current rules and would be a substantial change: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_rules#Forced_re-election: "If 20 per cent or more of the openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats." (This is now the second such case where you, intentionally or inadvertently, put in such a change. If it's intentional, please be very explicit about it. If it's not, I am happy to help catch those cases, but am getting a bit worried that it's me, as someone who was not familiar with those rules at all until a year ago.) Gerald

On 12/15/20 9:52 PM, Adrien Glauser wrote:

...

Damaging instant dismissal Fixed with 1 key stroke:

Petition of No Confidence:
When the Board Elections are not running, 10 openSUSE members may contact the Election Committee to request a petition of non confidence. The Election Committee then sees to organize a community-wide vote on the petition. The petition is accepted if the vote results in 20 per cent of Yes. If the petition is accepted, the Election Committee organizes a new election to be held no longer than < n weeks > after the vote.

(I had provisioned this measure before the < n weekS > clause, thanks for tying this loose end)

...

On the other hand, a board election will usually replace between two and three board members, so is not a complete alternative.

Why?

Board members have a 2 year term and there are 5 elected members, so generally we alternate between electing 2 members and electing 3, although if a board member steps down before the end of there term it could be 4 or more etc. If someone steps down from the board in October its likely the board will just function with one less member until the next election. -- 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 12/16/20 1:00 AM, Mark Stopka wrote:

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 3:28 PM Adrien Glauser wrote:

...

...

20 of what participants. I had in mind those in the oS community with voting rights. You think that should be made more precise?

If 20% of total members are required and not just vote participants, we certainly need to do some cleaning among inactive members...

As the rule currently stands its 20% of total members, and yes this is the one reason why cleaning up inactive members is important. My proposal doesn't change that part in anyway it just clarifies how this process is triggered as getting 20% of members to sign a petition or +1 in an email thread is impractical if not impossible to verify. As for the 20% value openSUSE's rules were largely taken from an existing organisations maybe Gnomes at the time so my guess without really checking is that this figure just came from there. I think the important thing is it reflects that a significant percentage of the membership is unhappy with the board. -- 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

alternating between electing 2 to 3 members yearly, and Board would continue working even with one or two empty seats.

I see. That's something to discuss in individual emails. The idea of the "when an election is not running" is to apply a "time lock", to be specified by the Election Committee, securing a temporal context around certain important steps, such as "campaign official kicks off, platforms are out, candidates meetup, votes". The value of this is to prevent Petitions of No Confidence in the middle of that, because we could end up with a very messy situation (i.e. inconsistent state). This idea of this is very flexible in that the time lock can be made to protect just the voting process, or more. I won't be checking up on this topic again so please for further discussion let's head to our email clients.

On Sat 2020-12-12, Simon Lees wrote:

Hi Election officials.

Given there was reasonable support for this idea, regardless of other changes we eventually make to the election rules I am requesting that you add a vote on the following upcoming topic.

Should the Election Rules be Ammended Such that

Forced re-election: 10 individual members may contact the election officials requesting they run a petition of non confidence in the board. If 20 per cent or more openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats.

Replace the existing

Forced re-election: If 20 per cent or more of the openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats.

That did not actually happen, did it? Gerald