openSUSE:Board best practices

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Best practices

This page collects so called best practices for common board tasks plus templates for handling stuff, mostly by email.

Board Meetings

Meeting reminder/invite

Two days before regularly scheduled board meetings, board@ receives an invitation/reminder. You can easily adjust timing and text of that reminder via https://github.com/openSUSE/mail-reminder .

Now that we are holding those meetings in public since June 2021 this invitation also goes to project@ including

• date, time (and time zone),
• virtual location,
• the current tentative agenda/topics, and
• how to submit topics.

Agenda

1. Everyone arriving, a few minutes of chit-chat
2. Identify minutes taker (round-robin based on board members' first names)
3. Verify previous minutes were published
4. Review list of agenda items (which should already be in the notes skeleton in Etherpad, though still may be useful to double check the issue tracker)
5. Check whether there needs to be a private part of the meeting (e.g. conflict resolution items)
6. Regular items
7. Private items (if applicable)

Minutes taking

Board members alternately take minutes, in alphabetical order based on first names; by default the chair moderates the meeting.

Minutes should include:

• Heading with date of the meeting and list of participants
• List of topic discussed and their content
• An early invitation for the following meeting

Draft minutes should be sent to board@lists.opensuse.org and guests who attended the meeting within a day or two after the meeting. Drafts are kept on an etherpad: https://etherpad.opensuse.org/p/BoardMeeting

The final version of the minutes should be shared with project@lists.opensuse.org mailing list when reviewed and approved by at least two other board members. Provide the other board members at least 24 hours to respond before sending the final version out. Afterwards it should also be added to the openSUSE Board Meeting Wiki page as archive at https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_meetings.

The deadline should be by the end of week the board meeting occurred.

Action items

The minutes taker shall also

• create code.opensuse.org tickets for AIs that came up, and
• close resolved tickets (such as agenda items fully covered).

Trademark-related issues

Domain Names

Like other trademark-related topics all openSUSE Internet domains such as country-/language-specific domains and domains used by the marketing team are handled by the board.

After the board has agreed, domain will be registered by the trademark owner (currently SUSE, in the future this might be the openSUSE Foundation). SUSE IT is managing those domain registrations. Cost is covered by SUSE. DNS is managed by the openSUSE Heroes.

openSUSE country-/language-specific domains will only be made available to known and trusted openSUSE members, and ideally a group of those to avoid singe points of failure.

They are intended for language- or country-specific presence and use cases and should not "compete" with contents and services provided via our general openSUSE.org infrastructure. Two possible examples are opensuse.jp for a presence in Japenese language and opensuse.mu for a presence of the Mauritian community.

Such domains are to serve subsets of the global openSUSE community, which entails abiding by the openSUSE Code of Conduct and all other rules and practices.

Practical steps to register a new domain:

1. Discuss among the group of people later using that domain, which can be the openSUSE marketing team or a local community/group of volunteers.
2. Approach the board, either directly or via progress.opensuse.org.
3. When/if the board has approved, create a ticket in progress.opensuse.org if there isn't one yet.
4. The chair of the board (or possibly another board member) is going to liaise with SUSE IT.
5. They also confirm the openSUSE ticket.
6. openSUSE Heroes set up DNS for the new domain.
7. SUSE IT registers the domain pointing to DNS servers provided by openSUSE (currently ns1/ns2/ns3.opensuse.org).
8. Have fun!

Varia

Joining the Board

• After the handover meeting, send an email to admin@opensuse.org to be provided with Wiki admin access to be able to edit the Board pages.
• Subscribe to board@lists.opensuse.org by sending an email to board-join@lists.opensuse.org. (Alternatively, as of 2021-03-08 Gerald has admin access.)
• Add yourself to the Board and Board history Wiki pages.
• Give the Board pages a thorough read.

Warnings

First Warning + 3 months ban

Hello [name],

the board has received a complaint about your behavior [place where it happened].

We have reviewed the incident during our last board call and came to the conclusion that your behavior was not in line with the way we want to interact with each other and is a breach of our code of conduct.

The board has decided to issue a *warning* to you and ban you from the openSUSE mailing lists and social media channels for three months.

After that period you are welcome to participate again.

If you continue to misbehave, you will be completely banned from the openSUSE mailing lists & social media channels.

On behalf of the openSUSE Board [Board Member's name]