The CentOS community, along with the Governing Board, is pleased to welcome two new members to the Board. Effective 8th April 2020, Thomas Oulevey and Patrick Riehecky will be joining the project leadership. (See also KB's announcement on the centos-devel mailing list.)

I spoke with Karsten Wade, who is a board member, about how the board selection and appointment process works:

"This is our first time doing this, and in planning it out, it quickly became apparent we didn't give ourselves a detailed roadmap back in 2014 with the new Project governance. The guidance was simply that the Board decides for itself who sits on the Board, candidates must have a body of work that benefits the CentOS Project and recognition as a leader in the community already, and we should review the make-up of the Board on a regular basis.

 

It turned out that such minimal guidance can be useful for remaining flexible, but it also meant we had to gut-check ourselves at every turn that we were following some kind of best practices. In the end, this time, we knew who we wanted and we just kept working things until we get there.

 

One of the activities of the Board in this coming year is going to be improving self-documentation, which I think will be a natural outfall requirement from the open goals refresh we're starting now that Thomas and Patrick are onboard. Our intention is to define CentOS leadership criteria as part of an open discussion process with the community. In the end, that is the true gift we gave ourselves back in 2014--the ability to operate in good faith under a set of governing principles that were good enough and the flexibility to evolve those principles when the time is right."

The two new Directors bring a wealth of experience and technical background to the table. They are also notable in that they come from two organizations which are actively involved in contributing to the project, and so they understand real-world interests and concerns.

Thomas Oulevey works in the Controls group within the CERN Beams department. As a system engineer he contributes his Linux knowledge to improve the exploitation of the Accelerator complex and technical infrastructure. Thomas has been contributing to CentOS since 2012, as a member of the infrastructure team. He helped to bootstrap few Special Interest Groups, helped the QA team with reports, and now mainly design and improve the Community Build Service.

Pat Riehecky works at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He is part of the Scientific Linux team and works on systems that perform Data Acquisition for various experiments at Fermilab. Officially Pat began working with the CentOS Community when Fermilab decided to use CentOS 8 as its EL8 base platform.

We're particularly pleased to enter this period of greater transparency around the CentOS Project with two new directors from outside of Red Hat, to broaden our perspective, get more industry input, and amplify the voice of the community in our decision making process.

Please join us in welcoming Thomas and Pat.