18th-20th March

Present:

  • Richard Brown - Chair
  • Michal Hrušecký
  • Kostas Koudaras
  • Tomas Chvatal
  • Gertjan Lettink
  • Bryan Lunduke - Extra special thanks goes to Bryan for attending via video conference at ridiculous hours in his local timezone after urgent personal matters kept him from attending the meeting in person.

As this years Board Meeting Minutes are so long, they are split into 3 sections

  • Meetings - Covering the meetings the Board had with various SUSE executives, managers, and engineers.
  • General - Covering the general agenda items/day-to-day issues
  • Strategy - Covering the ‘big picture’ issues the Board discussed

This email is Part 2, containing general agenda items

Part 1 is available HERE

Part 3 is available HERE

General

Desktops

Board discussed the state of the various desktops in openSUSE. Improving the selection screen to better reflect the actual nature of our distributions is something we certainly want to see.

AI: Board to discuss some ideas with our various Desktop Teams

Membership Tidy

Board discussed it’s ongoing efforts to tidy up the membership list. We have plenty of members that might not be around anymore. From previous discussions we have a draft of what we want to do and it was heavilly discussed over and over. So we will move to the implementation. Current plan is to do just a small changes that were already discussed (announcement pending), there might be a room for bigger changes and cleaning up the rules, but that would need mebers agreement. We should also remove inactive members of membership comittee. Together with retiring connect.openuse.org we probably can have some space to make membership management easier and faster.

AI: Tomas should investigate Helios voting system for openSUSE

AI: Michal to draft email about inactive members

AI: Michal to start with tooling and kickstart the process of retiring inactive members according to the proposal sent

AI: Michal is retiring connect.opensuse.org and doing the Membership tooling

Mailinglist Moderation

Board discussed concerns regarding some behaviour of a few individuals on the mailinglists.

We recognise that some misbehaviour requires fast action. Agreed that any one Board member can act on behalf of the Board.

When behaviour is not inline with the Guiding Principles the Board agreed a principle of 1 private warning followed by a Ban

Sponsorships

Conference in Albania asked for support, but as no person is going there from openSUSE, we are not providing money.

openSUSE only sponsors events where openSUSE can attend. We decided to become Platinum Sponsors to Greek FOSSCOMM- Greekos will be attending

We discussed updating the sponshorship document for people interested in sponsoring our Project in order to better guide what to do and what optons are available to become openSUSE sponsor.

AI: Kostas will take care of the Negotiation regarding FOSSCOMM

AI: Board to put together a Sponsorship policy document

Trademark

Trademark requests often get lost of spam, hoping the proposed new @opensuse mail system will be better with spam.

T-systems requested permission to use openSUSE on their new Open Telekon Cloud - Approved

AI: Richard to review/tune up filtering in current system so trademark requests don’t get lost.

Maintainer tidy up

Board discussed OBS state of inactive maintainers. With the members cleanup prepared we want to clean this up too.

It’s very important to new and existing contributors alike that it’s easy to identify who is responsible for which package, or which packages are low on active maintainers.

Technically we want maintainer tidy-up like the home: repositories cleanup

AI: Tomas will talk with Craig about OBS team preparing the code for this

Treasurer

Board wants to reduce it’s time spent worrying about money, sponsorship, and TSP related matters. The Board’s role is meant to be more focused on the actual immediate and long term issues impacting the Project as a whole, and the details of money matters is quite often a distraction from these.

The board agreed to create a openSUSE position called Treasurer. They will be a non-voting board member appointed by the Board. Responsibilities of the Treasurer:

  • Money
  • Sponsorships
  • Event
  • Merchandising materials
  • TSP

Treasurer must provide regular reports to the Board and thus is expected to attend all Board meetings where the above responsibilities are discussed

As a Board appointee, any future Board is expected to confirm their choice of Treasurer in their first meeting after being elected

This Board has appointed Andrew Waffaa to be the current Treasurer, effective immediately

AI: board should add treasurer to board ML and create treasurer@opensuse.org mail alias

AI: Board to announce it to Project

AI: Board to put stuff on wiki regarding rules/scope

Kickstarter

With the sponsorship document updated we could provide kickstarter option for community to sponsor hadware.

This should aim to please most people requesting separate foundation, because even small donations will be allowed to flow in.

AI: Tomas will talk with Andrew and Marketing teams on how to do this