So what suggestions would you have for improving this?
The purpose here is to have a discussion about what the project needs are in terms of governance, and part of defining governance involves defining what our goals are, what our needs are, and what isn’t being met.
What is “this”?
No one needs to be governed if no one is there (to contribute). You are declaring a problem (“inefficient” governance) that does not exist IMHO
Contextually, I think it’s pretty clear that in this instance, we’re talking about improving getting essential things done that aren’t getting done.
So you’re OK with there being no governance because there’s no contributors?
You don’t see a lack of contributors as an issue to be addressed, or a lack of governance framework as something that hinders contribution from new contributors?
Alright then, “things” are “essential things that aren’t getting done”. And what are the essential things that aren’t getting done in your opinion?
Sure thing, if there are no people there does not need to be governance.
The only issue currently is constant recruiting of contributors. And governance is next to irrelevant for the problem of recruiting of contributors. Governance might be something that happens once enough (any in many cases) contributors collaborate on a topic and choose a form for themselves. But in most cases it won’t happen and consensus will be the only form of governance.
That’s a good question. Certainly a major one is “making it easier for people to learn how to become contributors” - any sort of defined way of being mentored or taught by someone more experienced.
We’ve seen this play out with the passing of Larry Finger. Lee Ren Rainey has tried to pick up maintenance of VirtualBox, but he’s struggled with it (for multiple reasons). We should have better plans in place to handle situations like that so there’s continuity when someone leaves the project (for whatever reason).
The issue here that I see is that project governance isn’t on a micro scale, it’s on a macro scale. It’s not about “how do we govern recruitment”, but “how do we operate the project in a way that facilitates all of the things we need”. The distinction is important, I believe.
Well, here again, governance isn’t about the small scale, it’s about the large scale. Look at organizations like the CNCF or Linux Foundation - they have governance models that cover the broad strokes for how they operate.
With the creation of our foundation (the one Patrick set up), we are potentially moving out from under SUSE-based governance (which has been pretty loose). We need to understand how we deal with things like legal requests (including GDPR requests) and other things that have real-world implications. We can’t just ‘wing it’ when it comes to stuff like that. We have to have financial reporting put in place in order to meet compliance regulations around being a nonprofit (of whatever type and in whatever country that’s in). So a governance framework is needed for that.
There is also the question of project goals (which currently I think are too broad - “promote the use of Linux everywhere” is a nice sound bite, but what does that actually mean? What is in-scope and out of scope?).
Code of Conduct related issues. We have one. How do we enforce it consistently? What are the guidelines for moderation staff across platforms? There’s been some self-organization around that, but the next steps are to have something that’s consistently applied in all of our community spaces. Heck, even defining what constitutes an “official” openSUSE community space is a little unclear; who gets to decide what’s “official” and what isn’t?
Some of these things (particularly the last one) actually impacts recruiting of contributors - because it defines what constitutes a form of contribution that isn’t based on contributing code or packaging.
I found this to be a very good reference as to why governance is very relevant when it comes to recruiting contributors (specifically, the section “Making governance explicit”): https://www.theopensourceway.org/the_open_source_way-guidebook-2.0.html#_project_and_community_governance
The case study on the Kubernetes project mirrors almost perfectly the issue we face as a project. Having the governance model spelled out explicitly “cultivat[es] a strong sense of trust in your project’s community.” The end result was a doubling - and in some cases, a tripling - of the number of new contributors just by explicitly defining the project’s governance model so it could operate in a clearly transparent manner.
CNCF adopted a lot of what’s in this guidebook for their governance model (they are actually how I found it, because they reference it).
Uhm you seem to not have such a good understanding of the current governance structure.
There is no SUSE-based governance, just the openSUSE Guiding principles. Which state that there is no governance, except the self-chosen form of governance, of the people that do the work. And to help facilitate those self-chosen governance structures, there is a group of elected people (the board).
The Geeko foundation is “just” 3 people that came together to assemble an organization. Those 3 people govern themselves and their shared assets. They do not exert any governance over the openSUSE project.
This is the reality. If you want to change something, that is your base line.
SUSE provides both infrastructure for us and legal support (I’ve had specific discussions about GDPR requests with SUSE’s DPO and legal counsel). While the infrastructure is provided by SUSE, it is in SUSE’s control, and is technically governed by SUSE as a result.
As it stands today, this is correct. That foundation was created, however, with the intention of being a new umbrella to fall under that provides what SUSE provides, including a legal framework for accepting financial donations. Donations that, as I understand it, have come from the sale of apparel and other items bearing the openSUSE marks (which were sanctioned by the board).
That is reality.
Well, we disagree on that, but…fine. This is part of the issue - the lack of clarity to the average person participating in this project - or wanting to participate in this project - is part of the reason we have issues with (for example) recruiting volunteers to help.
BTW, I’m not the one who started this discussion. I did certainly help get the discussion space here in the forums set up so these discussions could happen, and I’m interested in being a participant in those discussions, but as the board made clear in their post on the project ML announcing this (from Simon Lees, dated October 16, 2024), the request to me came from members of the board.
Yet you appear to think (and I certainly could be incorrect in infering this from what you’ve written) that this is my brainchild - that I’m the one who wants to change things. I think these things are essential to the project being run more efficiently and effectively, but I certainly am not the single person thinking this is necessary.
Same as I govern my resources, you govern yours. What’s the point you are trying to make?
I guess you should really refrain from judging peoples intentions if you don’t know them. The purpose of the Geeko Foundation is stated on their page.
And quite frankly: They will never be able to provide what SUSE provides to openSUSE. SUSE and openSUSE are in a symbiotic relationship, you can’t replace on side of it without depriving the other side of it’s fundamentals. The Geeko foundation is just an addition to this situation, it’s not there to replace something.
The reality is: For years we have had several thousand $/€ hanging around in spreadshirt accounts from https://shop.opensuse.org/. Instead of letting them rot there, money now goes to the Geeko Foundation, that’s it.
It’s not very realistic to change the governance of a project because no one takes the time to explain (and often people don’t take the time to understand) what currently is.
You should stop trying to guess what I think, you are not very successful at it… 
I think there are many people reading our discussion, narrowing in on, what exactly the reality is. Agreement on what the reality is, is the prerequisite for discussing any change to it.
Well, we can’t do much about those who aren’t interested in understanding. But I’m glad that you see that there may, in fact, be an issue with it not being well-explained for those who want to understand.
It shouldn’t be necessary to ask - it should be well-documented and highly visible. The question shouldn’t be “what is it that we do” or even “where do we go to find it”, but “how can I help and what standardized processes are there for doing things?”
I’ve seen proprietary software companies do a poor job at standardizing processes, to the point that developers couldn’t easily move from one team to another without having to learn an entirely different way of writing their code. While the scope of this discussion goes beyond coding standards, knowing what to even generally expect when contributing in different similar areas is something that’s not very clearly documented anywhere. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places, though (hey, that’s entirely possible. If there is in fact a “how to contribute handbook” somewhere and I’ve missed it, I’d love to see it.)
Perhaps I’m just applying Cunningham’s Law to the situation so you share what you know.
Certainly you and I both have our own views of what the reality is. I’d like to have others outline their views as well, so we can find something to agree on as a “current state”.
I don’t think that means, though, that we can’t discuss a potential “ideal state” without knowing what the current state is. It’s easy enough to look at governance models for other similar organizations (I mentioned the Linux Foundation and CNCF as a couple I’ve looked at). Our current baseline is useful for planning how we change to a future state, but it isn’t really necessary to discuss what that ideal future state might look like.
The worst thing about this, without a doubt, is that this applies to those of us who have been here for years, imagine what it is like for anyone “from the outside”
I don’t know, but we have a great distro, great operative systems, but any distro has more users. And users complain about the lack of course, the doubts about concrete projects (Leap 15.6 or 16 or 15.7…). People doesn’t know who we are and what we are doing. Many people thinks this a free work from SUSE. Wiki works bad, software.o.o had better days.
I had a bitter discussion in Mastodon about openSUSE and this toot links a zdnet article with the text: Leap goes inmutable. Confussion with ALP continues in this phoronix thread
I know, I know that people drew their own wrong conclusions but the fact is that it happens. Somehow it seems that if you’re not subscribed to 20 mailing lists and subscribed to multiple github accounts there’s no valid way to find out anything.
The openSUSE project is not a uniform, streamlined and hierarchical, company like, operation. You know why? Because the Open Source community is not. As of this day, you are asking for uniform (coding etc.) standards for 15.807 different software projects in our distribution. You are asking for uniform standards for 90 software projects in our github organization that saw commits in the last month. 160 different projects if you count the last 3 months. What you are asking for is simply not possible even though it might make it a breeze for you to surf between, and do drive by commits to, different openSUSE projects.
What we do at openSUSE is complex, very complex. We provide people with a convenient “window” into what software the world wide Open Source community produces. If you want to contribute to openSUSE you have to value choice. You have to accept and respect that there are different ways to work, different preferences for applications, environments, tools or interfaces and different goals of users and contributors. You have to value diversity and pluralism as a way of addressing the needs of a broad variety of people.
That’s not to say that we haven’t streamlined many aspects of what we do as a community. It’s as easy as making an OBS account to be able to submit changes to the distribution. It’s as easy as having an email address to be able to participate in discussions about the direction of the distribution. It’s as easy joining a meeting to talk face to face to the people that do things. It’s as easy as making a github account to submit changes to most of the openSUSE infrastructure. It you don’t know what you want to do we have tons of guides, bug lists, notifications and even tools that try to guide you to the right place.
Are those things perfect? Certainly not. Can they be improved? For sure. Can we streamline more processes, provide more guidance? Absolutely. But can contributing to the openSUSE Project be less complex if we just have some form of “boss”, a top down organization and one way of doing things? Impossible. It does not help to suggest that this would be somehow a solution.
And what would be worse is trying to go down that path as it will just bind resources (that we already lack), alienate people that do things (that we already lack) and produce disappointment (that we already have enough of).
Now we’re getting to the meat of the discussion.
The purpose of this discussion is to identify areas for improvement, and to build proposals that can be taken both to the board and to the membership so we can improve things.
So, as someone who’s been around the project for a long time, what do you see as ways in which these areas can be improved?
I might be inclined to argue that if we already have enough disappointment, being afraid of making change because it might produce disappointment is just maintaining the status quo, which (based on what you’ve said here about lacking resources and people) also isn’t sustainable.
So…what changes would you propose? How do we make things better?
You keep saying this but the purpose of this discussion is: To put forward one or more detailed proposals around how the project’s governance structures should work.
Understand our governance structures and understand why they are like they are. Leave our governance structures alone, stop suggesting that they are our problem. Concentrate on the real problem we have: contributor sustainability. Follow “industry” best practices about this problem (build project/team → measure → diagnose → plan → improve → measure).
By the way: A perfect job for the openSUSE Board. If this isn’t
then I don’t know…
Kinda hard to put forward one or more detailed proposals around how the project’s governance structures should work without identifying areas for improvement.
Not what I asked, Henne. You stated:
So:
How can they be improved? “For sure” isn’t an answer to that question. Be specific, don’t just say they can be improved but hold back on how they can be improved.
How can we streamline more processes and provide more guideance? “Yes” isn’t an answer to that question. Be specific.
I know that. Are like they are because Novell doesn’t have any idea as FOSS works.
They could organize a FOSS distro like Fedora, but they wanted to be more ambitious. They knew they need to create the context where Linux was more used, but they doesn’t knew how do it.
What do you want to hear? Random examples?
Your ideas, since you appear to agree that they can be improved.
This special forum subsection is exactly what you’re claiming the Board should be doing.
It was setup at the request of the Board to “Facilitate communication with all areas of the community, Facilitate decision making processes where needed, and Initiate discussions about new project wide initiatives.”
That it may not be done in a manner you like or done the way you would have done it, doesn’t mean the Board isn’t attempting to do exactly what it’s empowered to do.
So far, the only thing you’ve had to contribute has been the equivalent of “Nothing needs to change, people just need to understand how things work.” Numerous people have said they don’t understand how things currently work, and have expressed confusion about how to figure out how the current workflows and processes, and policies are established or implemented.
This is not a new issue. This has been a common complaint of people trying to contribute for as long as I’ve been around the project, so obviously, if things are working just fine, we (we being “The Project”) are doing a terrible job of communicating and/or explaining to folks how things “work”.
I want to be crystal clear here. “The current way the project is run works just fine and we don’t need to change it” Is a perfectly valid position to have. It obviously works for you, and you see no need for change, or at the very least, don’t see the need for the same changes others might.
But saying things don’t need to change, and refusing to actually talk about how things currently work, in those areas where you are knowledgeable and involved, isn’t doing your position any favours.