CHAOSS Weekly Community Call, Jan 20, 2026 ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/eFP-ANg_vHc/maxresdefault.jpg) 🔗 **Source:** [CHAOSS Weekly Community Call, Jan 20, 2026](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFP-ANg_vHc) Okay. Hi everybody. It is Tuesday, January 20th. You're here for the weekly community call for chaos. So, thank you for showing up and showing your face, showing your Zoom, whatever you want to say. Um, share. Last week, I shared my whole desktop, so this time I didn't. If you want to add your name to the agenda, that'd be great. If you want to tell us a song that's in your in your playlist, if you're a repeater, great. If you're not, also valid. Uh, I did not add mine. Um, there we go. I don't know why that song's on my in my head. I like it. It's my hype song. I was just don I was just listening to Heroes maybe just >> good classics >> legendary song. So >> I'm getting recommendations for new songs on my reals slash Tik Tok and that's interesting. That's it's new for me. So yay. I feel cool. I feel relevant that way. Whether or not that's the truth is remains to be seen. But I feel that way anyway. Okay. Oh, one more thing to add to this. Um, okay. So, we do have pretty big news to talk about um today, but before we do that, I wanted to just mention a few things. Um, if you have not heard, if you're not in the group or were planning to attend the UN SG meeting tomorrow, that is cancelled. People are getting ready for Chaos Con and doing other stuff. So, um, don't go. No one will be there. The second thing is I wanted to ask if what we think about cancelling next week. I know a lot of us are going to be out and traveling and this and that. Do we do we want to or those who are going to be here, do you want to keep it keep it going? >> Yeah, I'm okay with cancelling. That seems completely fine with a lot of people on the road. >> Yeah, I'm seeing a couple thumbs up. >> Yeah. Okay. Any thumbs downs? Anybody who's particularly attached to this meeting and doesn't want to see it cancelled. >> To come next week, >> is that you Adena or are you thumbs uping the cancellation? >> Oh, the cancellation, please. >> Okay. Okay. >> I was going to volunteer you to run the meeting. So, there we go. >> You would be great. Okay. Yes, we will cancel next week. All right. And I guess if people do show up, they can just meet with each other. That's fine. Chat about whatever. It'll be a hangout like the newcomer hangout. Um Okay. And the third thing I wanted that was quick. I love it. The third thing I just wanted to mention is that Augur decided not to not participating. They decided not to participate. So if you see folks who are coming here and as far as I know nobody else in chaos wants to bring that on. >> I don't Yeah, I don't think so. At least not that I've heard. That would be the if if anybody was going to do it, it would been augur as far as I know. >> Yeah. Okay. Okay. >> Um so if if anybody sees anybody asking about it, you can tell them uh with Verve that we will not be participating. I mean that's strong, but you can you can confirm that we will not be participating. So, >> okay, >> hopefully that clears up some some stuff. >> We could also say like if I don't know if people really wonder, you know, the LF is participating again and as our foundation, we could just say there are projects that the LF will be sponsoring. I'm not sure what they are, but um Bill puts out a call every year for LF projects that might want to participate. And I think we've participated through the LF a long time ago. >> Oh, what what is the difference? >> I don't know. >> Okay, fair. That's valid. Wow. Maybe the LF does a lot of the administrative stuff that kind of bogs down projects of, you know. >> Yeah. >> Well, I think too the application for GC used to be very different. Um, and so I think it was probably easier to coordinate it through the Linux Foundation before. >> Gotcha. >> When they only had eight projects and not >> Yeah. 8,000 >> and when one of the Tox requirements wasn't already being engaged in the community. Um, >> yeah. >> Yeah. That's a that is a prime example of uh motivation that is meant to do good things but that actually kind of has the opposite effect. So yeah, it was a good good try. But yeah, kind of doesn't always turn out that way. Um okay, so I think that's it. Uh before we move on to our big news, does anybody have any questions about any of that? Is it would it have been necessary to put up a social post because I know I see a lot of people coming in and specifically for GC. I don't know like we have chaos con going on so might just be a lot of information for people. >> It's a good question. What do we think? >> Do we think that the GC folks look at our socials before they before they start to engage in the project? I am unconvinced they look at anything. >> I think it's better to focus on Chaos right now with the socials. Chaos Con. I mean, >> yeah. Also, it's like we've never said that we were I guess as I'm speaking we as in from like the Augur perspective that we have never we have not said that we were doing G-S this year and we have said in our like working group channel that we are not um and so I don't really think that people will look at considering that we can barely get a lot of those types to look at any type of documentation or like stuff that I wouldn't think that would they would be looking at the social media. >> But yes, to your point, we can post something if we haven't already um posted in general. We can post new newcomers um just to make people known or it known to folks who are here if they're looking for that. >> I thought your post in general was quite nice like >> you know. >> Oh, I did post that. Yeah. >> Yeah. Like if you want just so you can focus your efforts just so you're not waiting >> in hopes that we do it. >> Yeah. >> Well, I think you posted it in newcomers. It might be good to also post it in general. >> It was somewhere. I saw it this morning. >> It was somewhere. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> Well, wherever I didn't post, I will post. >> Might be good to pin it in newcomers as well. >> Awesome. Cool. Okay, let's give space now for a big conversation, the big news. I'm going to turn this over to Dawn and I'm going to stop sharing my screen so that she can do that. Yeah. So for the past past few months um the chaos governing board has been um basically has been working to move to an elected governing body. So this is something that was brought up a while ago in one of the community meetings and there were a lot of community members who were um expressing support for us moving to an elected governing board with with terms. So, so this is something we've been we've been working on. Um, it's hard it's hard to change the governance of a project the size of chaos with a 15 person board. Um, but we did it. So, we got the charter approved by the governing board and the Linux Foundation, which is one of the requirements and we have some some basic information about the election. So, there's still a lot to sort out. We need to um for example, we need to get some people to run the election. So, election officers who will then set up a timeline for us. So, I've been working on been working on that. Um, but this is this is what it looks like. So, um, governing board uh, governing board members will now serve 2-year terms. So, when someone is elected to the governing board, they'll serve for two years and then they can they can choose to run for reelection as many times as they want. There's no term limits. So people can continue to run in the in the elections. We do have two dedicated seats. So we have a dedicated seat for um for our two primary software projects. So for Augur and Grimar Lab. Um those seats will also be determined by an election. So that's specified in in the charter. Um so so we have those those two seats as well. and then the rest of the seats are filled in in an election. So with half of them up for one year and half on on the next year so that we don't have full board turnover at any point. Um if you think maybe you might be interested in being on the board, uh what it takes is, you know, you have to be a community member who's been actively participating in some part of the project pretty consistently for the past six months. and then you'll need to be endorsed by two um eligible voters to run in the election. So this prevents things like like spam and people kind of gaming the system. Um and then basically anyone who participates in the chaos community can vote in the election. So the eligible voters are the existing governing board, chairs for our working groups, uh the people participating in our software projects, anyone making a contribution to the GitHub repository. There's a table that shows you um all of those um for the last for the last year and the people um listed in the community contributions.mmd file. And so this is where be so we haven't put together the timeline for the election but if you've been contributing to the chaos project and your contributions have not been captured in GitHub or elsewhere this is where you should add your contribution to become eligible to vote. So you can see that there's you know facilitating meetings um you know uh working on uh chaoscon for example there's there's loads of loads of things that aren't necessarily considered in some of the other areas. So if you want to be eligible to vote I would encourage you to go ahead and use this community contributions file. Um there's a there's a process for that. There's a you open an issue and there's a little little process Um, and the other the other change, and it's not something that we've had come up, or at least hasn't in the past couple of years, but um, no more than two seats can be held by employees of the same organization. So, this is this is what prevents an organization from trying to, you know, have a takeover of the of the board. So, so we have a a process process for that. So at this point I will I'll just stop talking and ask if there are any questions. Yes. Merry blessing. >> Um yeah this is a very huge and good update I would say and um thanks to you and the governing board. Um I I I think I wanted to just ask in simple terms like for community members um what what does this change mean for for the project and for community or members participating in the project um moving forward? Yeah, I would say that the the biggest change for for community members is this gives you a voice in the top level leadership of the chaos project because historically we didn't have we didn't have term limits. Some of the people have been on the chaos board since uh 2017. So they've been on the board for for a very long very long time. And the way that we bring new people into the board um now before before this change was we would you know if we if somebody stepped down from the board we'd say you know well you know who might be a good person to replace them and as a governing board we would just decide who replaced them. So that really didn't give people who outside of the governing board, people from the from the rest of the community, it didn't really give them an opportunity to have input into who is leading the project. And the other thing is because because there are terms, this means that we'll have an election every single year and about half of the seats will be up in the election. Now, like I said, people can choose to run again, people who are on the existing board, but this because we haven't actually brought any new people onto the board since uh trying to remember since 2023. So, it's been 2 and a half years since we've had any new members on the board. So, the other thing I would say is this gives um newer community members a regular yearly opportunity to run for a seat on the chaos governing board. So, that's that's where I see it impacting the um the broader community. I don't know if there's several board members on the call. I don't know if anybody else has any thoughts wants to add anything to that. >> No, that was good. I I would just add that I think having it in writing also just clarifies for everybody what the process is and it brings more transparency to the process. So it it in my opinion it improves inclusion, it improves diversity, it improves transparency um and I think that it also encourages people to um document their contributions which we have struggled with in the past. So, I think that this solves a lot of things. So, A+ A+ I'm a big fan of this um decision. >> Yeah. Plus one to everything Elizabeth said. Um other questions. >> Do we do we have this um on this website already or just on the this GitHub um repository? >> Yeah. So, the way this works is we we do have the changes to the charter which are on the website itself. Um, and so it has, you know, the last update date. It has, you know, things about serving a two-year term, election procedures and methodology, uh, meth methodology, meth methodology is the word I'm looking for. Um, and a link to to GitHub. Um, so the way we do this for other other projects is that the actual election mechanics and the software and there there's a there's a whole bunch of technical stuff that has to happen around running these elections and that is a lot easier to have all of that in GitHub. So the plan is really not to put the mechanics on the website um is just to leave them on GitHub, but people can really easily find them because it's linked right here from from the charter. So they can find the the page on on GitHub that has has all of the details and it's all in this elections folder. And so there'll be a folder that's something like 2026 um you know - GB or something and then we'll have a folder which has all of the documents that we need to run the election. So it'll have the people who are eligible to vote. It will have the timelines. It will have all of the candidates. Um, so having all of that in one place in GitHub makes it a little bit easier. >> Great. Thanks. >> Yeah, other questions. >> Um, I have, sorry, I have one more question and you might not even know the answer to this, which is also valid. Uh so when people do run, will they be given an opportunity to um communicate their uh contributions to the project or like um what's the word? You know, run like kind of run. So will they be able to interact with people and answer questions about, you know, kind of just how they feel about chaos, whatever. I don't know what that would even look like, but um just wondering what that looks like. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, so what we generally would have is a candidate would submit something they and they submit it as a PR and GitHub and we can decide what these fields are. So, we may we may add some additional additional things um and then the election software that we use pulls this um content directly from GitHub and displays it in the election software. So the election software will have the list of candidates and it will pull the data from from this. Um but we you know we'll decide what we want these because there's a there's a template that people that we create that people can use. So we'll decide what's in this what's in this template and um yeah and then we do want people to talk about what you know their their contributions. um it'll probably be something something similar similar to this. So, you know, what are your what are your contributions and why are you running? Because I think those are the two things that we generally care most about when we're evaluating candidates to decide who to vote for. At least from my perspective, those are the two things I look at. What What have they done and what are they going to do when they get elected? >> Yeah, that's excellent. We could even do like an issue template for it. The same, you know, similar process for what we have for that contributions doc or something like that if if we're um going to allow people who aren't familiar with GitHub to to also be a part of it because that might be a just a little barrier for folks to not if they don't know how to do that. Um but yeah, I love this. That's that's perfect. That answered my question. >> Yeah, we'll have to talk about that because the output this is actually the output. This is what they put in. It's actually YAML because that's what the election software needs. >> Gotcha. >> So that may I've I've used YAML to generate issue templates, but I'm not sure if the issue No, because it has to be a PR. It has to be a PR. It can't be an issue. Um, but we'll look at that. We'll look at that. We'll look at ways maybe we can make this easier for people. We can also pair them up with people who can help them with the PR. Yeah, that's fair. >> So, I think we should look at look at ways to make this more inclusive >> and and Elizabeth has so so we still need the election officers to be ratified by by the board, but I know Elizabeth has volunteered to be an election officer. So, we'll um we'll make sure that people are well represented by the election officers for the for the election. And there is information about how what what the criteria are for becoming an election officer and how that works as well in that doc. Right Don? Did I see that? >> Yes. >> Election. Yeah. There you go. >> Because there is there is quite a bit of criteria for being an election officer. So you can't be um uh you have to be a community chaos community member in good standing. Um not running for steering. Um, not currently part, sorry, not running. Man, I missed one again. Steering in the election. >> I see it. >> All right. I think I can fix the typo without getting re reapproved by the board. >> That's okay. >> Um, uh, yeah, not running for the governing board in the election and they're not part of the current governing board. So that they are completely completely impartial. Will you clarify? >> There will be one election officer who's not uh who's not really currently involved in the chaos community because we need someone who with expertise in the election software and the two people within the community that have that expertise are are not people who can be an election officer. Um but I also have a volunteer uh who's fantastic who has offered to help with that. So other questions, comments, thoughts? >> Yeah. Can you um clarify the I think you said there was two reserved seats for the two software projects. Is that can you clarify kind of the intent of that? Is that supposed to be just like like a minimum bar or like limiting the number of people from the software projects that can be board members? >> No, it's not limiting. Um what it is is let me let's see I can find the the part in here. Um so each KS software project will have a dedicated seat on the governing board. Um there there will be so this is this is right here. Um, so it's basically there's one seat that's dedicated to Augur and one seat that's dedicated to Grimmore Lab and they the software project will define an election process and select their representative who will be on the on the board. Um, and so that those are just for those two seats and then anyone can run in the general part of the election. So it can be people who are part of these these projects. Um it can be people who um you know do anything else. So these are these are basically reserved seats but they're not limiting seats. So you know as many people from the Augur project as wanted to run on the on the governing board could run. Did that answer your question Adrian? >> Yep. I think so. >> Okay cool. Other questions, comments. Okay, cool. Thanks everybody. >> Thank you, Don. I feel like >> and we'll have more announcements when we have things like like timelines and um checking voter eligibility and making sure the candidates have enough time to get involved. >> Um yeah uh that will be helpful because I just want to make sure that we are communicating this a lot throughout the project. So >> yeah, excellent, excellent work. I know that was a long time coming and a lot of work. So thank you. >> Okay. Um uh we have time now I think uh actually let me pause. Folks who are on chaos con committee how are we feeling? Do we need to take some time today? I don't see gayorg. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> Or I I don't know if you I'm assume that he was in here because I am messaging him. >> Oh >> yeah. I was I was thinking we'll discuss the schedule because um it's like um we've had a lot of changes. So yeah. Okay. So Adena um is that okay if we push till the next meeting talk about this? >> Yes please. It's okay. No problem. >> Thank you. Thank you very much. Um because this is cool and exciting and I want to make sure we have enough time to give it the attention that it deserves. So thank you so much. Um let me just put a note here. Next meet. So it'll be in two weeks. Okay, perfect. All right, I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing and stop the recording. If you're in the uh CASCON committee, planning committee, uh stick around. If you're not, you can you can have the rest of your time back. Stop., CHAOSS Weekly Community Call, Jan 20, 2026, YouTube, 01kp8jbybmardtmewm3znbdyht.