Hello, Am Donnerstag, 6. Juni 2019, 15:11:48 CEST schrieb Richard Brown:
- The interpretation of consensus by the Board should be communicated in advance of any vote by the Board, and should be open to challenge on the opensuse-project mailinglist.
I'm afraid we'll introduce a superfluous delay by doing so. I can imagine we might end up with discussing what the consensus is in one meeting (and maybe work on the exact wording), then send out a "formal" mail saying so (which is basically a pre-decision), and then vote about it in the next board meeting two weeks later (typically confirming what we discussed two weeks before). IMHO we can drop the "in advance" part to speed things up, and replace it with "the board will instantly send a mail after such decisions (independent of the board meeting minutes)". Of course the decision will still be open to challenge on the opensuse-project mailinglist, and in worst case the board will have to revert its decision and let the community vote. In the end, we'll have exactly what Richard's proposed rule does, but without the two weeks delay.
- If the discussion does not produce a clear consensus, a vote of openSUSE Members should be conducted - The result of any vote that involves at least 2/3s of the current membership will be considered immediately binding as a formal decision of the Project
If I get the follow-up discussion right, we'll reduce this to 20% participation - which is way more sane for votes about single "detail questions".
The above proposal would only apply for individual aspects of the overarching effort to establish a Foundation for the Project. I do not propose it should apply for the actual formation of the Foundation.
For that I believe there should be a final confirmatory vote of the openSUSE Membership. That should require 2/3s participation to be considered valid, and it will be that vote that will formally reflect the communities agreement or rejection of the formation of a Foundation for the Project. I feel the Board should not have a fallback role on such a significant topic for the Project. Failure of the vote to receive 2/3rs participation in the vote should be considered a rejection of the Foundation, due to lack of sufficient interest from the Membership.
With that rule, we can stop talking about a foundation _now_. Call me a pessimist, but I seriously doubt that 2/3 of our members will vote [1]. For comparison: The last board election had 52% participation. In the year before, the percentage was slightly higher (59%), but only because we had less members back then - the absolute number of voters didn't change much. Setting up a foundation is a big and important change for openSUSE, and I hope that our members are interested enough in it to vote. Nevertheless, more than 2/3 participation would surprise me, and I'd hate to kill the foundation setup with such a barrier. I agree that we should have a minimum participation, but not 2/3 please. I'd go for 40 or 50% - that's more realistic, and still means lots of our members have to vote.
Richard Writing as an individual contributor (ie. I didn't discuss this with my Board colleagues before posting it)
That was a good idea - it speeds things up and makes the discussion (including my evil comments ;-) more transparent. Regards, Christian Boltz [1] I'd be happy to be proven wrong ;-) --
[vim] Um einem Editor-War vorzubeugen: mit Emacs, Kate, nedit und mcedit kann man auch HTML-Dateien erstellen. Und auch mit allen anderen Editoren, die ich an dieser Stelle nicht genannt habe ;-) Du wirst ja immer unfreundlicher ;-))) Womit sollen wir uns denn das lange Wochenende vergnuegen. So ein richtig schoener flame-war, das waere doch wieder einmal was :-) [> Christian Boltz und Heinz W. Pahlke in suse-linux]
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