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Upcoming Board Elections
(7 votes, average: 3.86 out of 5)
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It has been a year since the first-ever elections where the community voted in a new openSUSE Board. Replacing the bootstrap board selected by Novell, the Community elected, as its representatives, non-Novell employees Pascal Bleser and Bryen Yunashko and Novell employees Federico Mena-Quintero and Henne Vogelsang. In May, due to overwhelming work responsibilities, Federico stepped down and runner-up Stephen Shaw assumed his position. Michael Loeffler was appointed by Novell as Chairperson of the Board.
As agreed upon, prior to last year’s elections, the highest vote-getters in both Novell and non-Novell positions would assume a two-year term, and the second vote-getters would get a one-year term. This was a one-time arrangement, with the intention of ensuring there would be an election every year for half the electable board positions. As such, we will be holding elections again this year. All winners this year and subsequent elections will have a two-year term.
The Board has several announcements to make regarding the upcoming elections.
- The Board has recently agreed that as our community continues to grow, it is important that the diversity of voices of our community needs to be adequately represented and heard during Board discussions. As such, we are adding a new elected non-Novell position to the Board, effective immediately with the next election. This position will also be for a two-year term. The new Board makeup will be two Novell employees, three non-Novell employees, and a Chairperson selected by Novell. The Board grows from 5 seats to 6 seats.
- As the number of openSUSE members has seen a strong increase over the last 12 months we won’t have the “Nomination of second voters” again.
- We are proud to see some returning members of last year’s Election Committee along with some newcomers. New members Kevin Dupuy, Sascha Manns, and Thomas Schmidt join returning members Claes Backstrom and Andrew Wafaa.
- The Election Committee has begun initial discussions and will make their own announcement in the near future regarding campaign guidelines and timelines. With this, effectively all discussions, planning and announcements pertaining to the election will be handled by the Committee and the Board steps out of further election discussions.
At this time, the Board would like to remind you that only Members of the openSUSE Community are eligible to vote in the upcoming election. If you are not currently a member and have actively participated in the Project as a developer, packager, tester, advocate, evangelist, or some other form of active participation, we urge you to apply for membership at users.opensuse.org before the Election Committee’s announced deadline for application.
See you all in Nuremberg for the openSUSE Conference this week!
Adding a new non-novell position is a good idea to increase the credibility of the board as community oriented tool, however making the positions (all) last two years partly hides this result. Given the goals of the board, having a two-year governance is not required, in my opinion. Moreover, I would like not to see again the split between board members elected for two years and board members elected for only one year.
Restricting the vote to members is keeping the community closed, also considering the extremely slow membership approval and the requirements. And the invitation to become members to be eligible to vote sounds like a quick way to get the membership, when others had to wait, or are still waiting for the approval.
I misread. Good also that all member are elected for the same time. Two years is too long though, for the same reasons I said above. There is no need of such a long term in the board, and it is better to have a dynamic change in the board too, with the impossibility to re-elect members for more than two times.