Open Source Summit + ELC Europe 2018

Healthy open-source communities usually include a wide range of people with very different ideologies, goals, values, and points of view; from anarchists to CEOs of major corporations. The normal approach for making decisions that affect the entire community should be an attempt to reach consensus through discussion. But what if you're attempting to make a decision which is critically important, but for which you know there are irreconcilable differences in the community?

The XenProject community had such a decision to make in the wake of the XSA-7 security issue. This talk will cover the approach we took which (we think) allowed us to find a "center of gravity" for the community, and allowed everyone to feel that their viewpoint was considered, in the spite of the lack of any option with clear consensus. We hope this will help other communities navigate similarly difficult waters.