Appointment of Board Members.

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 02:24:50PM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> >From the meeting, reworded to start discussion.
> 
> Currently the Fedora board is made of 9 members with 4 of them being
> appointed. What are the benefits of this arrangement, and is there a
> path where the Board could move to being completely elected?
> 
Pros of appointment:
* The FPL can balance out the Board with alternate viewpoints from people
  who might not be popular

Cons of appointment:
* The FPL can potentially exert a tremendous amount of power via
  appointment.  If one issue matters a lot to them, they can get within
  1 vote of a majority by appointing people who agree with them.

Notes:
* In the Max Spevack era, the Board was pushed away from making decisions
  for two reasons: 1) FESCo was deemed to be the body that understood the
  technical issues at hand and therefore the body that should make most of
  the decisions regarding Fedora.  2) The Board was not all elected and
  therefore didn't have as much of a "mandate from the people".  In the Paul
  Frields era, the Board started to make many more decisions.  I don't think
  that's necessarily a good thing as they've trampled all over reason #1
  above but being fully elected would help to alleviate reason #2.

* Basically, the power of appointment gives a lot of power to a canny FPL to
  push their most pressing agenda items.  Whether this is good or bad
  depends on whether you agree with the FPL's vision or disagree.

-Toshio
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/attachments/20100813/f65b31dd/attachment.bin