Hi Karsten,
Thank you for the update.
Topics covered in the meeting and via email are discussed below, and remain open on the Board’s rolling agenda for future conversation and actions:
1. Board membership: 1. The Board has been considering for some time adjusting the membership of the Board, in particular by adding new Directors. Discussions with potential new Directors will begin.
That's great news. Will the process be similar to how it's done in the Fedora Project [1]? So with a public list of nominees, published interview with each nominee and public voting results? Is there a way for the Community to (self-)nominate?
For better Community coverage perhaps CentOS Board related postings could also be sent to the centos-announce and centos mailinglists?
Thanks, Patrick
[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/program_management/elections/
On 11/27/19 6:34 AM, Patrick Laimbock wrote:
Hi Karsten,
Thank you for the update.
Topics covered in the meeting and via email are discussed below, and remain open on the Board’s rolling agenda for future conversation and actions:
1. Board membership: 1. The Board has been considering for some time adjusting the membership of the Board, in particular by adding new Directors. Discussions with potential new Directors will begin.
That's great news. Will the process be similar to how it's done in the Fedora Project [1]? So with a public list of nominees, published interview with each nominee and public voting results? Is there a way for the Community to (self-)nominate?
It's something we could consider, but this isn't how it's been discussed so far.
For better Community coverage perhaps CentOS Board related postings could also be sent to the centos-announce and centos mailinglists?
I'm sort of against sending these to -announce, but only because we have a number of people who parse that list with automated tooling, not because folks actually read it. I don't want to change expectations and tooling without a good reason. I could see sending to the centos main list though.
Thanks, Patrick
[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/program_management/elections/ _______________________________________________ CentOS-devel mailing list CentOS-devel@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel
Hi Patrick,
Sorry I missed this before, just found the discussion when working on the current agenda. I'll be sure to watch more carefully in the future, part of the reason for sending to this list is to have these discussions.
Rest of my lengthy answers inline below:
On 11/27/19 9:34 AM, Patrick Laimbock wrote:
That's great news. Will the process be similar to how it's done in the Fedora Project [1]? So with a public list of nominees, published interview with each nominee and public voting results? Is there a way for the Community to (self-)nominate?
Jim already gave a succinct answer, but I thought you might be interested in my complete response.
The short metaphorical answer is, where it comes to good transparency, the Board is just learning to crawl. As much as we want to begin working toward a marathon, we know we need to get through to learning to walk first.
In order to be successful at what you describe, we need more time as an active and proper open source project.
Fedora Project existed for many years with a high standard of transparency before the original Fedora Board was created. It then started as a blend of appointed (like me!) and elected Board members. Having been through that evolution, I have an intimate idea of how much longer it can take and more complex it can be than the ideal of e.g. starting from scratch with a new project.
By comparison, my reckoning is the CentOS Project only began to act like a proper open source project around the time the Virt SIG was created to support the Xen kernel. Of course, the joining of forces with Red Hat was at the core an effort to create a contributor-centric project but primarily around the SIGs; we left other parts e.g. core Linux building alone as "don't break". Not forever, but for a while, and now that five yeas has passed, it's more than time to improve those parts, too.
We've built on that plan with SIGs so now it is possible to contribute to a sizeable part of the project. But with the mix of legacy infrastructure, technical and governance debt from the last 7+ years, and the changing needs of a contributor base ...
Frankly IMO, today we do not have a large enough community of leaders who could be nominated, nor a mature enough contributor base to hold voting. This is largely the fault of the existing leadership, specifically those of us on the Board of Directors. Lack of transparency and lack of focus on growing leaders I think are at the core of that situation. People have stepped up and tried, and not been enabled or supported as well as they could have been.
The project has definitely been moving toward better transparency, to the point where the most obvious transparency problems are at the top of the governance.
So we need a little more time before holding open elections in order to realize things such as transparency norms, consistent and productive meetings, and clear evolution.
For better Community coverage perhaps CentOS Board related postings could also be sent to the centos-announce and centos mailinglists?
I'm a bit on the fence about this because I'm not sure it's on topic for centos@, but maybe it's OK and not much noise to add to that list?
What I mean about on-topic is that the Board deals with issues affecting contributors, who themselves are the interaction points with their userbase. If I were an end user of e.g. RDO, I would find it confusing that in addition to RDO leadership there is this group above the Cloud SIG making decisions, should I be worried about them, what is going on, etc.
So the norm so far has been to have SIGs communicate with their userbases, including the Core SIG and CentOS Linux users. (Don't be too confused that some of the people in the Core SIG are also Directors; in wearing different hats, we have to be prepared to speak from different authority points.)
We can change up that norm, but I think it's worth discussing with the SIG leaders how they want Board communication handled for their userbase. Does that make sense?
So for this time I'm just sending to the contributor list and posting on the blog. Let's keep discussing and see if there is a consensus on if and how to include the userbase in this transparency, perhaps as soon as the Jan 2020 meeting.
Best regards,
- Karsten
Karsten,
Thanks for the updates and all of the directors efforts in the direction of more transparency. These initiatives do take time to evolve and from our side, we appreciate the work which is going on.
One possible option for the future would be to provide observer status for the board meetings. This would allow interested parties to listen in and follow the activities. My experience of open source project board meetings is that this also helps for those who might be interested to get involved in project governance to understand the discussions (and in some cases determine there are other areas they would prefer to devote their efforts :-)
Tim
On 13 Dec 2019, at 20:03, Karsten Wade kwade@redhat.com wrote:
Hi Patrick,
Sorry I missed this before, just found the discussion when working on the current agenda. I'll be sure to watch more carefully in the future, part of the reason for sending to this list is to have these discussions.
Rest of my lengthy answers inline below:
On 11/27/19 9:34 AM, Patrick Laimbock wrote:
That's great news. Will the process be similar to how it's done in the Fedora Project [1]? So with a public list of nominees, published interview with each nominee and public voting results? Is there a way for the Community to (self-)nominate?
Jim already gave a succinct answer, but I thought you might be interested in my complete response.
The short metaphorical answer is, where it comes to good transparency, the Board is just learning to crawl. As much as we want to begin working toward a marathon, we know we need to get through to learning to walk first.
In order to be successful at what you describe, we need more time as an active and proper open source project.
Fedora Project existed for many years with a high standard of transparency before the original Fedora Board was created. It then started as a blend of appointed (like me!) and elected Board members. Having been through that evolution, I have an intimate idea of how much longer it can take and more complex it can be than the ideal of e.g. starting from scratch with a new project.
By comparison, my reckoning is the CentOS Project only began to act like a proper open source project around the time the Virt SIG was created to support the Xen kernel. Of course, the joining of forces with Red Hat was at the core an effort to create a contributor-centric project but primarily around the SIGs; we left other parts e.g. core Linux building alone as "don't break". Not forever, but for a while, and now that five yeas has passed, it's more than time to improve those parts, too.
We've built on that plan with SIGs so now it is possible to contribute to a sizeable part of the project. But with the mix of legacy infrastructure, technical and governance debt from the last 7+ years, and the changing needs of a contributor base ...
Frankly IMO, today we do not have a large enough community of leaders who could be nominated, nor a mature enough contributor base to hold voting. This is largely the fault of the existing leadership, specifically those of us on the Board of Directors. Lack of transparency and lack of focus on growing leaders I think are at the core of that situation. People have stepped up and tried, and not been enabled or supported as well as they could have been.
The project has definitely been moving toward better transparency, to the point where the most obvious transparency problems are at the top of the governance.
So we need a little more time before holding open elections in order to realize things such as transparency norms, consistent and productive meetings, and clear evolution.
For better Community coverage perhaps CentOS Board related postings could also be sent to the centos-announce and centos mailinglists?
I'm a bit on the fence about this because I'm not sure it's on topic for centos@, but maybe it's OK and not much noise to add to that list?
What I mean about on-topic is that the Board deals with issues affecting contributors, who themselves are the interaction points with their userbase. If I were an end user of e.g. RDO, I would find it confusing that in addition to RDO leadership there is this group above the Cloud SIG making decisions, should I be worried about them, what is going on, etc.
So the norm so far has been to have SIGs communicate with their userbases, including the Core SIG and CentOS Linux users. (Don't be too confused that some of the people in the Core SIG are also Directors; in wearing different hats, we have to be prepared to speak from different authority points.)
We can change up that norm, but I think it's worth discussing with the SIG leaders how they want Board communication handled for their userbase. Does that make sense?
So for this time I'm just sending to the contributor list and posting on the blog. Let's keep discussing and see if there is a consensus on if and how to include the userbase in this transparency, perhaps as soon as the Jan 2020 meeting.
Best regards,
- Karsten
-- Karsten Wade [he/him/his]| Senior Community Architect | @quaid Red Hat Open Source Program Office (OSPO) : @redhatopen https://community.redhat.com | https://next.redhat.com | https://theopensourceway.org gpg: AD0E0C41 | https://red.ht/sig
CentOS-devel mailing list CentOS-devel@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel
On Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 14:14 Tim Bell Tim.Bell@cern.ch wrote:
Karsten,
Thanks for the updates and all of the directors efforts in the direction of more transparency. These initiatives do take time to evolve and from our side, we appreciate the work which is going on.
One possible option for the future would be to provide observer status for the board meetings. This would allow interested parties to listen in and follow the activities. My experience of open source project board meetings is that this also helps for those who might be interested to get involved in project governance to understand the discussions (and in some cases determine there are other areas they would prefer to devote their efforts :-)
+1 to observers.
And thank you to the board for having these hard conversations about transparency, and being willing to admit past failings and move forward boldly.
+1 to observers as well.
Gregory Young
From: CentOS-devel centos-devel-bounces@centos.org On Behalf Of Rich Bowen Sent: Friday, December 13, 2019 2:21 PM To: The CentOS developers mailing list. centos-devel@centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS-devel] Minutes for CentOS Board of Directors 2019-11-13 Meeting
On Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 14:14 Tim Bell <Tim.Bell@cern.chmailto:Tim.Bell@cern.ch> wrote: Karsten,
Thanks for the updates and all of the directors efforts in the direction of more transparency. These initiatives do take time to evolve and from our side, we appreciate the work which is going on.
One possible option for the future would be to provide observer status for the board meetings. This would allow interested parties to listen in and follow the activities. My experience of open source project board meetings is that this also helps for those who might be interested to get involved in project governance to understand the discussions (and in some cases determine there are other areas they would prefer to devote their efforts :-)
+1 to observers.
And thank you to the board for having these hard conversations about transparency, and being willing to admit past failings and move forward boldly.
On 12/13/19 2:14 PM, Tim Bell wrote:
One possible option for the future would be to provide observer status for the board meetings. This would allow interested parties to listen in and follow the activities. My experience of open source project board meetings is that this also helps for those who might be interested to get involved in project governance to understand the discussions (and in some cases determine there are other areas they would prefer to devote their efforts:-)
Hi Tim
As it happens, Rich Bowen and I have been talking through an idea for something like an advisory council that would be involved in discussions during a portion of a Board meeting, for much the similar purpose you describe. This is an idea that has come up a few times from various Directors over the last several years.
The item didn't make it on the Dec agenda because we're still working up the proposal; I think Jan is likely. My plan is to put out the proposal here prior to the meeting to get some initial feedback on how it's structured and would begin.
My personal thinking is to follow the iterative opening-up method -- start with an invited group of people in a closed but public agenda/minutes session; do that for a period of time such as 6 months; then see when we might transition to adding more ways to observe in real time or via recording.
This is all about balancing the needs of the various stakeholders, which range from small to large end users, upstream projects dependent on CentOS in various ways, Red Hat engineering and product groups that work upstream and downstream from CentOS, the various SIGs, ISVs, IHVs, and all their network of relationships, and so forth. Out of simplicity and an abundance of caution we got this started on a private-only track 6 years ago, and deeply appreciate the patience of folks as we untangle old and present needs into better leadership.
Best,
- Karsten
Tim et al interested in the idea of an observer status for CentOS Board meetings.
We discussed that and some related ideas within the context of additions to governance, covered under the "refresh goals" section (item 2) of the meeting minutes:
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2020-January/036398.html
These ideas can all be discussed among all of us as part of the public process around those goals.
We'll get together a few stakeholders/interested parties to work through this during the first quarter of 2020, all as a public and transparent process mostly here on centos-devel and within some shared/versioned content location e.g. git.centos.org. I'm also thinking of hosting some writing sprints around this at the CentOS Dojo before FOSDEM in four weeks.
Best wishes to all in this New Year,
- Karsten
----- Original Message -----
Karsten,
Thanks for the updates and all of the directors efforts in the direction of more transparency. These initiatives do take time to evolve and from our side, we appreciate the work which is going on.
One possible option for the future would be to provide observer status for the board meetings. This would allow interested parties to listen in and follow the activities. My experience of open source project board meetings is that this also helps for those who might be interested to get involved in project governance to understand the discussions (and in some cases determine there are other areas they would prefer to devote their efforts :-)
Tim
On 13 Dec 2019, at 20:03, Karsten Wade kwade@redhat.com wrote:
Hi Patrick,
Sorry I missed this before, just found the discussion when working on the current agenda. I'll be sure to watch more carefully in the future, part of the reason for sending to this list is to have these discussions.
Rest of my lengthy answers inline below:
On 11/27/19 9:34 AM, Patrick Laimbock wrote:
That's great news. Will the process be similar to how it's done in the Fedora Project [1]? So with a public list of nominees, published interview with each nominee and public voting results? Is there a way for the Community to (self-)nominate?
Jim already gave a succinct answer, but I thought you might be interested in my complete response.
The short metaphorical answer is, where it comes to good transparency, the Board is just learning to crawl. As much as we want to begin working toward a marathon, we know we need to get through to learning to walk first.
In order to be successful at what you describe, we need more time as an active and proper open source project.
Fedora Project existed for many years with a high standard of transparency before the original Fedora Board was created. It then started as a blend of appointed (like me!) and elected Board members. Having been through that evolution, I have an intimate idea of how much longer it can take and more complex it can be than the ideal of e.g. starting from scratch with a new project.
By comparison, my reckoning is the CentOS Project only began to act like a proper open source project around the time the Virt SIG was created to support the Xen kernel. Of course, the joining of forces with Red Hat was at the core an effort to create a contributor-centric project but primarily around the SIGs; we left other parts e.g. core Linux building alone as "don't break". Not forever, but for a while, and now that five yeas has passed, it's more than time to improve those parts, too.
We've built on that plan with SIGs so now it is possible to contribute to a sizeable part of the project. But with the mix of legacy infrastructure, technical and governance debt from the last 7+ years, and the changing needs of a contributor base ...
Frankly IMO, today we do not have a large enough community of leaders who could be nominated, nor a mature enough contributor base to hold voting. This is largely the fault of the existing leadership, specifically those of us on the Board of Directors. Lack of transparency and lack of focus on growing leaders I think are at the core of that situation. People have stepped up and tried, and not been enabled or supported as well as they could have been.
The project has definitely been moving toward better transparency, to the point where the most obvious transparency problems are at the top of the governance.
So we need a little more time before holding open elections in order to realize things such as transparency norms, consistent and productive meetings, and clear evolution.
For better Community coverage perhaps CentOS Board related postings could also be sent to the centos-announce and centos mailinglists?
I'm a bit on the fence about this because I'm not sure it's on topic for centos@, but maybe it's OK and not much noise to add to that list?
What I mean about on-topic is that the Board deals with issues affecting contributors, who themselves are the interaction points with their userbase. If I were an end user of e.g. RDO, I would find it confusing that in addition to RDO leadership there is this group above the Cloud SIG making decisions, should I be worried about them, what is going on, etc.
So the norm so far has been to have SIGs communicate with their userbases, including the Core SIG and CentOS Linux users. (Don't be too confused that some of the people in the Core SIG are also Directors; in wearing different hats, we have to be prepared to speak from different authority points.)
We can change up that norm, but I think it's worth discussing with the SIG leaders how they want Board communication handled for their userbase. Does that make sense?
So for this time I'm just sending to the contributor list and posting on the blog. Let's keep discussing and see if there is a consensus on if and how to include the userbase in this transparency, perhaps as soon as the Jan 2020 meeting.
Best regards,
- Karsten
-- Karsten Wade [he/him/his]| Senior Community Architect | @quaid Red Hat Open Source Program Office (OSPO) : @redhatopen https://community.redhat.com | https://next.redhat.com | https://theopensourceway.org gpg: AD0E0C41 | https://red.ht/sig
CentOS-devel mailing list CentOS-devel@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel
CentOS-devel mailing list CentOS-devel@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel
-
Jim Perrin -
Karsten Wade -
Patrick Laimbock -
Rich Bowen -
Tim Bell -
Young, Gregory