Finding inactive openSUSE members

Projects organize their governance in different ways; often that governance depends on a definition, or formal recognition, of a "member" of the project. Members can generally vote on the membership of boards and committees, sometimes on technical or policy questions, and on changes to the governance itself. Typically, membership is granted to those who are active in the project, but members can become less active (or completely inactive) over time. What to do about inactive members is a question that the openSUSE project has been struggling with recently.

The openSUSE Members wiki page provides information on how to become a member of the project and what the benefits are. Continued and substantial contributions to the project are the criteria for membership; the benefits include an "@opensuse.org" email address, an IRC cloak, some blogging privileges, eligibility for the board, and voting rights. There is a proposed entry on that page about how to maintain membership, but the only way listed to lose membership status is to resign or be kicked out by the board for repeated violations of the guiding principles.

Some would like to establish a way to remove inactive members from the project. It has been discussed on the opensuse-project mailing list for some time—starting back in June in this iteration—but there have been earlier discussions as well. As a result of those mid-year discussions, Jean-Daniel Dodin (also known as "jdd") proposed a rather complicated manual method to scan for project activity to try to narrow down which openSUSE members are active and which might be contacted to try to better determine their status. In response, there were suggestions of ways to better automate measurement of the activity level of members, but there were also complaints about the whole idea.

Cornelius Schumacher took exception with expending any real effort in trying to find active versus inactive members. He called it "very creepy" to scan for members' activity, which "has more potential to destroy community than to build community". One of the attributes of a volunteer community is that people can drift in and out of active participation without being removed from the community, he said. Furthermore:

Several followed up with support for Schumacher's statement, but others are concerned that having a large pool of voters that do not vote makes it appear that there is less support for proposals that pass than there really is. Richard Brown, who is the chair of the openSUSE Board, noted that any changes to governance or membership rules would require a vote of the members:

But Schumacher remained unconvinced. Inactive people don't vote and, in general, aren't affected by the outcome of the votes, he said, so the number of inactive members doesn't really matter. Board member Robert Schweikert called that "a bit too simplistic"; since the inactive members could vote, they might have an undue influence given their status. In addition, without knowing how many inactive members there are, there is no way to distinguish between active members that choose not to vote versus those who are inactive and didn't vote.

Schumacher thought the idea of inactive members voting was purely a theoretical concern. He reiterated his belief that it is much better to spend time and energy on the active people and delivering openSUSE to its users. But Dodin pointed out that it would be useful to know why members become inactive in case their inactivity points to problems that the project could try to address. Schumacher agreed with that point.

The project board exists to "provide guidance and support existing governance structures, but shouldn't direct or control development", Schumacher said, quoting the guiding principles. So the board does not really "influence the direction of the project", thus voting for the board is not as consequential as some would have it. Both Brown and Schweikert, who are on the board, disagreed with that, however.

Brown stated: "The Board today is involved in far more decisions and influence of the Project than the Boards when those Principles were laid out". He also noted that the boards for KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation are both elected from the members of those projects, requiring a quorum of member votes, and having requirements for members to maintain their status. Those are all things that might make sense for openSUSE as well, he said, but for now the focus should be on getting a level set on where things stand:

Schweikert also raised another concern. There is a quorum of sorts required for calling early elections for the board:

He corrected the figure to 20% in another post, but the point is still valid. At some point, the number of inactive members may reach a level where it is impossible to change the board in an early election, which certainly seems suboptimal.

The thrust of Schumacher's argument is that the project should not spend time and energy on more formal governance structures and the like, but should instead focus on delivering openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed. Others have a somewhat different, but not entirely incompatible, view. Overall, the project has gone through some changes lately, so it is not really surprising that there might be some differences of opinion on some of the steps moving forward. The good news is that those differences have been discussed openly and without rancor—which bodes well for everything resolving amicably. So far, at least, what that resolution might be is up in the air.