[CentOS-devel] Proposal: CentOS Public Board Meetings

Mon Jul 19 20:13:47 UTC 2021
Rich Bowen <rbowen at redhat.com>

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.