OpenSUSE Project Governance/Contribution Conversations

English Open Chat
1

There are some interesting conversations going on here Smoother Operations and Project & Governance here. I can’t comment on these posts, but wanted to add my 2 cents anyways. Interesting questions:

  1. Does (or what does) the project need to change to enable the community to accomplish things more effectively? This one is probably complex but my immediate thought is that there are two approaches depending on whether the project already has “enough” capable contributors to approach all tasks, or not enough. If it already has enough and just needs to invigorate things, obviously some sort of community engagement is in order. However, if the issue is that there is a smaller group of capable community members now, then it would make more sense to consolidate and prune projects and online presence that are not currently a priority. An obvious example is the openSUSE Software Portal, which is reportedly mostly abandoned. It is still a good resource, but that abandonment can be felt very strongly for new users (one click install failures, for example) and makes the project feel more dead than it is.

  2. What governance should the openSUSE project have? My input here is that it should be related to the size of the community. I see arguments for more structured governance, and I see arguments suggesting that additional governance is not necessary. I think that all depends on the size of the community and whether the existence or lack of structure has had an affect on the growth and/or efficient operation of the project. And since this will likely be subjective for each person, some method of collecting data and understanding the biases to discern a bit of the truth is probably needed. Perhaps a community survey as a start? I’d also keep in mind that the community is probably larger than those who hang out on the forums or on Matrix/IRC chat. Maybe there is a way to reach people on their PC via a notification from the system, along the lines of the Steam Hardware survey (which many people seem to look forward too)

2

You can comment in the thread (and that would be preferred); just ask to join the group per the instructions at About the Project Discussions category (and how to participate) :slight_smile: All are welcome to join in those discussions.

We would far rather not have the discussion happening in multiple areas, but rather have it be focused in the space we’ve set up for it.

1 Like
3

Closing this topic so the discussion isn’t split between here and the project discussions area.