[om-council] TC-meeting today.

Ben Bullard benbullard79 at cox.net
Fri May 12 15:49:32 EDT 2017


Raphael can you or someone please forward this to Council as Mailman is 
currently broken? Thanks in advance.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

First please know that I try to be aware of and that I do appreciate 
everyones contribution, efforts, and hard work. I need to single out our 
developer community here and acknowledge that in some ways Y'all are 
doing an incredibly good job. Your hard work and efforts are very much 
appreciated.

Need to sound off and bounce some serious thoughts off all of you. I'm 
aware these are direct challenges to officers of the Association and to 
Council. That is intentional.

FWIW-1: Starting to think we have serious governance issues at OMA and, 
especially, with the distribution.

1. Decision making process seems utterly broken.

2. The disconnect between developers and rest of Community is so 
profound as to be damaging to the Association and the distribution.

FWIW-2: What ever transpired in Hungary has never been disseminated to 
the Community still to this day. This goes to both points in FWIW-1. I'm 
tired of hearing I cant's and we cant's on issues like this. That is not 
an excuse for not communicating with Community. If it's to much trouble 
to communicate with Community then Association should dissolve. If 
addressing this isn't a more important issue than switching urpmi to dnf 
than we go back to FWIW-1.

FWIW-3: I need to get a yes or no decision on the main-testing repo in 
ISO's issue. By any measure this is irresponsible. I can't imagine 
QA-Team approving something like this. Whatever the cause of this is we 
need to address and fix the real problem not resort to, again, 
irresponsible**practices. This is, to me, embarrassing and holds the 
potential for a public relations disaster. *For the distro this is a 
suicidal decision.* If addressing this isn't a more important issue than 
switching urpmi to dnf than we go back to FWIW-1.

Two things about this.

  a. It should have been discussed. Was it? If it was I'm not aware of 
it. I was blind sided by this. I don't care for being blind sided.

  b. This should have been announced. Was it? As above...

  c. If this was discussed and announced than there may be serious 
communications failure.

FWIW-4: The issue of default file system on the ISO's is similar to to 
the issue about main-testing repo in the ISO's.

  a. It should have been discussed. Was it? If it was I'm not aware of 
it. I was blind sided by this. I don't care for being blind sided.

  b. This should have been announced. Was it? As above...

  c. If this was discussed and announced than there may be serious 
communications failure.

Aside: Both of these (FWIW3 and 4) are issues that do affect QA-Team 
(and the Community at large) and IMO QA-Team should have been part of 
the decision making process. This is disrespectful of our time and 
effort. Both of these issues effect far to many people to be decided by 
one person or a small group. Besides which such behavior makes the 
Association and distro look dictatorial rather than inclusive.

FWIW-5: We need to get our own house in order before we even think of 
releasing ISO's for public consumption. This is the responsible course 
of action for the Association.

FWIW-6: For those of you who have decided to switch from urpmi to dnf 
perhaps it would have been wiser to include more people in the 
discussion and decision making process or at least let the Community 
know that this is going on. From the outside looking in it appears that 
a very small group of people are deciding what is best and the rest of 
us can like it or leave. Again this could have been handled better. The 
fact that the Community by and large has not stepped up is not an 
excuse, you don't engage a Community by not trying. If what we are doing 
isn't engaging Community then we need to ask why it isn't working and 
correct that.

In summation:

1. We're never going to be able to engage the Community and grow the 
distro if we don't even try. And we aren't trying.

2. The way we are currently governing the Association and more 
specifically the distribution is exclusionary not inclusive. If we wish 
to grow the distro we need to change this 180 degrees.

3. I personally feel on the outside looking in as if "It's OK for ben79 
to do testing but he better keep his nose out of important stuff".  And 
bear in mind it doesn't matter if this is literally true in this 
instance perception is everything. If there are others feeling this way 
imagine the damage that has been done to Association and distro.

4. Would it be possible that all of us, me included, find a way to learn 
how to communicate with and initialize communications with users, 
testers, people on forums and mailing lists, publications, ect. in such 
a way as to engage and attract participants and grow the distro? 
Currently we seem to be doing the opposite. Surely there is some source 
of education on this. If developers aren't willing or inclined to do 
this then we must have someone to interact with developers and 
communicate with the Community and the Linux public at large on behalf 
of and in cooperation with our developer community.

Since I'm not privy to Council meetings how or where will I be able to 
find answer to these important questions?


Thanks,

Ben Bullard

ben79
--------------------
OpenMandriva-QA Team


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