On 12/28/20 9:30 AM, redbaronbrowser via CentOS-devel wrote: > Things are very different to have a governance meeting which had Chris Wright, Brain Exelbierd, Rich Bowen and Carl Trieloff. Are these considered to be active members of the CentOS community or mostly employees expected to make Red Hat's interests a priority? > > With those type of people at the meeting, they should have been able to make deobfuscating the patches part of balancing CentOS' needs when being switched to being the upstream provider. Clearly balancing the needs of CentOS and closing the openness gap was not priorities of that meeting. > > Despite that, Karsten Wade still felt it completely appropriate to post a blog post about this closing the openness gap. > > The contradictions don't stop there. > > We have had Red Hat employees asking us if we would be interested in taking part in an OpenStack SIG. Red Hat being interested in there being such a CentOS SIG would be consistent with them having put Rich Bowen on the governance board. To be completely clear, I am not on the governing board. My presence at these meetings, as community manager (a position I have held for 3 years) was *specifically* to increase openness of the governing process. My role there is to say things like "shouldn't this conversation be happening on the public mailing list" and "when can we expect the minutes to be published" and "please address the open issues in the governance ticket tracker." https://www.centos.org/about/governance/ says: Also in regular attendance: Rich Bowen (Community Architect, attendee ex-officio) Which is to say: not a member, doesn't have a vote. But, yeah, I do consider myself an active member of the CentOS community. I've been running CentOS Dojos around the world for 3 years. I write our newsletters. I manage our social media presence (along with other awesome people like Ljubomir). No, I'm not writing code or rebuilding packages, but I do consider these to be important contributions. That said, the focus of the last several meetings has indeed been closing the openness gap - this was even before the recent announcement. This has led to more regular publishing of minutes https://blog.centos.org/category/board-minutes/ - yes, there are some missing, but I believe that we now have a full set of minutes for the entirety of Thomas' term as Secretar. It has also led to the ongoing work on governance documentation, and in the agreement, by the board, to open the board meetings to the community. (Yes, these decisions are minuted.) It is, of course, understandable that you're unaware of these decisions, since the decision itself was to address that lack of openness. Carl has been a member of the board since 2014. Brian Exelbierd has been actively involved in Fedora for years. His addition to the CentOS board was, indeed, recent, and he is the Red Hat Liaison, as documented on the CentOS wiki - his addition to the board was in line with the Liaison definition described there. Chris Wright was there as a representative of Red Hat, who, as you are no doubt aware, has a controlling interest in the CentOS project, and pays the bills, and has done so since 2014. It's not weird that he was there. If anything, it was a mark of respect that the CTO was sent to the meeting, rather than someone lower down the chain. I am unclear what your objection is to his presence at a board meeting. I, for one, look forward to broader community presence at Board meetings. However, I think most people will be dismayed at how boring Board meetings actually are. The notion that it's some kind of smoky back room where The Important Decisions get made is, sadly, not true.