Board Meeting Summary 15 December 2010

For the full transcript of the last openSUSE Board meeting, see our logs.

Introduction of new openSUSE Board Chairman - Alan Clark

We opened with an introduction to new Board Chairman, Alan Clark who answered general questions from the community about his role and goals. To the question of what Clark’s goals are he answered:

_First, The top goal is as a Board to get the Foundation up and operational. As we continue to work towards this, I'm sure that we will uncover other issues that we will need to address. Second: Grow the Community Third: Is a personal goal: Tune up my decoder ring for all these alias cloaking and get to know as many people as possible -simply because that is the fun part of being in a community. Fourth: Let people get their work done; er "have a lot of fun"_

Alan also provided his background experience with open source projects, both within Novell and outside Novell.

Foundation Creation

Several board members expressed a desire to develop a more open and transparent process in communicating the development of the openSUSE Foundation than what currently exists. Some believe there has been a disconnect in how we become aware of what everyone is doing and keeping the momentum of the process going forward, as well as ensuring that all those with a vested interest are able to participate in the process.

We all agreed that we must begin to identify who are the stakeholders and take steps immediately to open up the process. To that end, a new open mailing list will be created and Alan will create a wiki page where we will collect all the relevant information for the foundation creation. Relevant points and concerns of the stakeholders will be listed and the progress of the creation will be documented.

Membership Approval Concerns

Membership approval team members expressed concern about the clarity of the rules for consideration and eligibility.

In the current rules, it states that a membership application is processed after receiving four votes. It was unclear whether that meant four votes in sum or four votes of either positive or negative. With a minor edit of the rules, we stated that an application is considered processed once it has received either four positive votes or four negative votes.

Additionally, there was concern about a recent email request to process a particular application expeditiously. Team members felt this was an inappropriate breach of protocol and that all applications are equal and that no single application should be placed ahead of existing applications. We agreed and declared that henceforth, such requests should not be honored.

Where do we fail?

Our regular topic to identify areas where we fail and can quickly remedy brought up a topic of concern regarding communication. To this, we agreed that the Board will begin regularly posting summaries of meetings (which is what you are reading now.)

We also took a general board action item to review opensuse.org product category in openFATE to ensure we stay on top of “Where do we fail?” concerns that are not brought up during board meetings.

Read here for the full meeting transcript.

Next Meeting

With the holidays coming up, we will have our next Board meeting on 12 January, 2011.