In January of 2021, the CentOS Board of Directors opened our monthly meetings to all SIG chairs, in a first step towards more transparent governance. We wanted to see how the larger audience changed the meeting dynamics, if at all, as well as welcoming a broader pool of voices.
We are now ready for the second part of this process. Starting in the August meeting, we will be inviting the entire CentOS community to attend these meetings.
Due to the nature of the Internet, we won’t be simply publishing the meeting URL, as this often leads to disruptive behavior in meetings, as I am sure many of you have experienced.
Rather, in the week before the meeting, we’ll send, to this list, a way to request an invitation to the meeting. In this way, we hope to limit the incidence of such disruptions, while also making the meeting available to anyone who wishes to attend.
We will be working on the rules of engagement for these meetings, but they will be, at minimum:
* Wait to be recognized by the Chair before speaking * Respect the Chair when told your time to speak is over - this will allow us to remain on agenda, and complete the meetings in the allotted time * In the event that there are Board-confidential topics, these will be put at the end of the meeting, in Executive Session, and guests will be asked to leave. We hope to minimize these items, but they do sometimes happen. The most common scenarios in which this may happen are personnel issues, or information that Red Hat wishes to share with the Board, but is not yet public. * Muting of participants, or, in extreme situations, ejection from the meeting, is at the sole discretion of the Chair. * Meetings will be recorded, and published to YouTube (possibly with edits/redactions, as approved by the Directors). Thus, by joining the meeting you consent to have your presence at the meeting, and anything you say during the meeting, made public.
Because there will seldom be time for Q&A during the meeting itself, we plan to add a post-meeting IRC office hours session for followup questions. This will probably be scheduled for a week after the board meeting, to allow time to publish meeting minutes
We welcome your comments about the above proposal, and thank you all for your patience as we implement these changes to our governance process.