The openSUSE board met for a day long meeting on March 22nd in Nuremberg and via video link. We would like to report to the community some of the goals and actionable items that resulted from that meeting. 1. The members of the board discussed ways to make our communication better. The most perceived problems are A) requests to our private address (board@o.o) don't receive a timely response and B) the process how we reach decisions on requests is not well defined. Although we are unable to respond to all requests with an immediate resolution, the board will in the future provide an acknowledgment and a time frame for an expected response. To ensure that, we are going to implement some kind of ticket system for the board. To solve the second problem we agreed that we are going turn down the notch on voting a bit to make it possible for single board members to address "simple" issues on their own. We rather want to act as what we are, a group of friends, then voting on everything. This also addresses the problem that it's not always clear what is a response from the board and what is an opinion of a single board member. In the future you get the groups formulated opinion from board@opensuse.org and everything else are individual opinions. Additionally this makes it easy to identify issues that are not "simple" and need further discussion and most likely voting in either the project meeting or our mailing lists. 2. We talked about what we think are the projects strengths that need emphasizing right now and agreed to stress the fact that we are all here to have FUN together. That we rather want to have a bit creative ANARCHY without the need of complex, excessive bureaucracy and rules. And that we are here to collaborate and help each other out, not to make life harder for each other. We are going to make those points abundantly clear in the near future and let them guide us in what we do. 3. For starters one thing that all members of the board are tired of is the mood, tone and behavior of certain people on our mailing lists. It's seldom FUN, SIMPLE and COLLABORATIVE to bring up an issue on, say, opensuse-project. We need to change this to get the mailing lists back to being a productive, fun, collaborative place where we listen to arguments and address problems in a constructive and open way. Each and every one of us wants to discourage mailing list vandals who only state opinions, while expecting someone else to make the fix. As a board we invite the community to actively deter these unproductive activities through social pressure. Making the lists fun will invite existing contributors who aren't on the list(s) to join and to entice new people onto the list(s). 4. The board members will continue to strive to ensure the project IRC meetings are much more exciting, efficient and of value to the community members by striving to: 1. Provide an agenda before hand so that all members are informed as to what will be discussed 2. Only meet when there is an agenda 3. Time box the meeting to 1 hour with a proactive moderator tasked with keeping the meeting on topic and within time boundaries 4. Get rid of general items(boring) and replace with specific agenda items and reports. 5. Have the meeting moderator (rotating) be responsible for finalizing the agenda, rejecting or deferring topics as required. 6. Hold project meetings at 20:00 UTC on every other Wednesday. The board also reviewed the initial ideas covering the fiscal management of community funds and the project sponsorship program. These will be developed into proposals to be presented to the community at a later date. We thank the community for your continued support and look forward to serving you. The openSUSE Board -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org