So I skimmed through the Board Elections platforms. For all who don’t know this: The candidates for the upcoming openSUSE board election have to fill out so called platforms on the wiki with some straight forward questions made up by the election officials. You should read them, interesting stuff. Anyway I’ve also read mine and worked it over a bit. As always when I express my opinion I try to be thorough and comprehensible so I came to the conclusion that I have three points to make for this election. Le me try to explain them in detail here. For today I want to write about:
Guiding
Take our values and our vision and oversee that the project really runs by these.
Reasoning
In life, the knowledge who you are and what you want is a very precious one. If you know that, do not lie to yourself about it, and keep faithful to it, you usually turn out a better person. I think the same holds true for any other entities like companies, football teams or open source projects. Good thing the openSUSE project has exactly defined that in its Guiding Principles.
The Guiding Principles exactly state who the openSUSE project is, what it wants and how it wants to get there. If we, the members of this project, follow this, I’m sure we will succeed. The Guiding Principles are also the reason we do this board exercise because in reality rules are only as good as the enforcers :)
So in my opinion this is a task the board has to take on and expedite. If the openSUSE project does something it has to be in the spirit of the Guiding Principles. And i think the board needs to be the entity that verifies that. This is usually not an issue because we are all acting in good faith, are reasonable people and love what we do. But nevertheless the board needs to lead by example and keep an eye on the direction(s) we are heading.
Examples
To make this practical I want to include some examples. If we discuss, for instance, some controversial topic like BulletProof-X and it gets very heated, board members need to step up and try to steer this discussion. Because we value respect for other persons and their contributions, for other opinions and beliefs. We listen to arguments and address problems in a constructive and open way.
If we are trying to decide if we want to include non-oss software on our installation media and it boils down to pure technical arguments, board members need to step up and discuss whats more important. Our values of the ideals of free software: the freedoms to use, share, study and modify, and share modified versions. Or should we be more practical and on put more weight on our users, their desires and goals, their need for help when encountering problems.
These are just recent events where I think that guiding would be needed from the openSUSE board. This, by no means, is a call for other openSUSE Members to slack off. Following the Guiding Principles and stepping up for them is every openSUSE Members duty. I just think that board members to exemplify this behavior for others.
That’s it for the first point I want to make. I still have a week to get the other two posts done. Ah my compile is done, so back to business or to speak with Douglas: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by”
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish! :)