On 08/02/2008, Roger Whittaker
It's clear that a project like openSUSE (or Fedora, or Debian) needs some formal (and ultimately legal) system of governance, and a Board is welcome and necessary as a way of providing that, so long as its workings are transparent and open.
But I'm slightly uneasy about the whole membership concept.
This begets the question - do you see any way other than a membership system to have an elected board in the future? This is a stated aim of the current board. Clearly an election where anyone can vote would not work, as people from other distributions or even corporations such as Microsoft could alter the outcome. The current board was selected by Novell, as I see it the only way to move towards an elected board is to have a membership system in place. There are more reasons than just representing the project that require a somewhat exclusive group. There is already an exclusive group which has been representing the project, choosing the board, and making decisions up until this point. This group has been a subset of Novell employees. The membership process opens this up to non-Novell employees and makes the process transparent. Now anyone can apply, and anyone can see who is already a member. Therefore it seems to me that the membership system only reduces exclusivity, rather than increasing it. Could it be improved further, certainly. However, most of the concerns seem to be implementation details, and the system can be evolved to meet the changing requirements of an expanding community. I would certainly be personally interested in hearing if you have any suggestions on how the practical requirements of the community such as elections and representation can be addressed without a membership system. -- Benjamin Weber --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org