On 10/02/2015 01:05 PM, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
On Friday 02 October 2015 14:23:55 Richard Brown wrote:
We've discussed this repeatedly on this list now
Yes, but it seems there is no consensus on the topic, so maybe we do need to discuss this further. To me this is important because it is about the core values of the project, about our openness, and about the question who we want to be part of the project and whom not.
Membership is a key part of this projects governance, and the current situation where membership votes have a terrible turn out is not acceptable
Why is that not acceptable? The active people vote, the inactive don't.
I think this is a bit too simplistic. By casting a vote for the board elections the voter has a certain influence on the direction of the project, and we can argue about this as part of this discussion. Thus, with a large number of inactive "openSUSE Members", per the member definition, the problem arises is two fold. a.) If non of the inactive members vote then those that are active have the influence they arguably should have, but we do not know if this is the case and thus the vote (number of voters vs. number of members) looks non representative due to the low turn out. We can also not differentiate between the inactive non-voters and those that are active but choose not to vote. b.) If everyone votes then one can argue that those that are generally inactive have an undue influence over the direction of the project by casting their vote. These are just the two most obvious, from my perspective, problems that arise by the skew of "active openSUSE Members" vs. "inactive openSUSE Members". The problem does not necessarily need to be solved by culling the membership list. Other approaches may be feasible. - Run the "activity script" in November and the top 200 contributors get invited to vote. This may be one potential option. We can then argue about how we determine the "top 200", or we can pick another arbitrary number. - We can avoid the problem by changing the governance structure, dismember the board and have the role of the "Board Chairman" be renamed as "Community Liaison" to the primary sponsor of the project. - Another option is to move to a "pay for" model. Pay a yearly membership fee and the payer is in, whether or not the person paying contributes is immaterial. Those that pay get to vote. - Have an entirely appointed board. The board composition can still be determined by the current rules. The board terms can also remain in place. New board members could be appointed/nominated by the rest of the board, the sponsoring organization(s), or anyone in the community. Presumably the nominees would be from a pool of most active people. The current board members then pick from the pool of nominees. Anyway as Richard pointed out, a change in governance model needs a vote by "openSUSE Members" which brings us back to the original problem. Of course we can choose to change the governance model with the current voting structure.
It makes sense to care about the number of active people.
Agreed.
But what does the number of inactive members change?
It skews everything, see above.
Nothing, because these are the inactive ones.
From my perspective this is not correct. As I tried to explain above inactive "openSUSE Members" do have an effect on the project in one way or another. Thus, I think, it is fair to try to quantify that effect and possibly reduce or avoid the effect.
Note that this is a very different kind of governance than elections for a government or similar votes. A government decides for everybody, also for the people who didn't vote. There a strong legitimation by good participation does make a difference.
But for openSUSE, which is a volunteer project, and those who don't vote because they are not interested anymore are also not affected by the results of the votes,
I would argue they are. They may not care about the effects, but that is a different discussion. The way the project represents itself, internally and externally, the way the project conducts presence at events etc. is representative of all those that are associated with the project, active or not.
because they chose to not participate anymore. In such a situation the number of non-voters says nothing else than how much of a history the project had.
With the exception that you cannot differentiate between the people that are active and do not vote and those that are inactive and do not vote. Thus it is pretty much impossible to "care about the active" people and try to understand why the choose not to vote. That is also an important part about caring for the active people, at least from my perspective. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU Public Cloud Architect LINUX rjschwei@suse.com IRC: robjo