On 7/17/20 10:16 PM, Klaas Freitag wrote:
Am 14.07.20 um 16:40 schrieb Vojtěch Zeisek:
I wonder if people who started and/or support the petition have any idea, or better, plan, what to do next. Many problems with the Board were pointed out, but were there clear evidences to convince people to sign the petition? We'll see. And if the petition succeeds, what will be next? Who will run for the Board under current situation? Of course, such argumentation is not sufficient to not sign the petition, I just wish to point out, that destroying is easier than creating and I wonder if anyone has any plan, how to make the project great again...? ;-)
Great question. Yes, destroying is easier. I would consider 'not changing' a slow way of destruction.
Now with the result of the petition at hand, I think the board should not go back "to normal", but consider to change things drastically. It has turned out that the current governance model of openSUSE has not succeeded in improving the projects relevance nor to unite the contributors behind a common goal or vision.
OTOH openSUSE is heavily depending on SUSE company, technically (all the work of SUSE R&D) and financially and also in the way it can evolve.
IMHO that should be clearly admitted, and instead of trying to decrease the influence of SUSE and manage openSUSE independently (which would fail big times with the current setup), openSUSE should move closer to SUSE company and also put the governance of the project more under the hat of SUSE.
So concretely the plan could be:
1. The new openSUSE Board (after the election) decides to dissolve itself in the current form at a specific date in lets say 15 month later.
Board members are up for re election every 2 years and can serve a maximum of 2 terms at a time so within 18 months every current member will have been up for reelection anyway (with exception of the Chairman)
2. A group of people of community and SUSE company is formed to work on a proposal for a new governance model for openSUSE, in tight cooperation with SUSE. The board as an institution does not have a saying in this, only individual contributors (which can be board members of course).
Currently there is already work being done towards creating an openSUSE foundation which would be a new governance model that addresses some of the current limitations that we have with the current model. Although most of the things we are trying to address are around handling finances and being able to sign legal agreements. The board has been quite involved in this process to date but it has also involved people from SUSE and other community members. The current proposals have mostly been around extending the existing rules but there is scope to make some changes where the community seems necessary. The final decision on whether such a proposal should go ahead will be via a vote of members rather then via the board deciding. If you look through the archive of this list for threads with "foundation" in the subject you can find a bunch more info. 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