Appointment of Board Members.

[Max Spevack]

>> I wanted to make sure that the folks who had built and managed Fedora 
>> Extras so successfully were still leaders in the technical 
>> discussions happening in Fedora.  Thus, s/Extras/Engineering in the 
>> term FESCo, and a period of re-discovering what that actually meant. 
>> But the *mandate* was always there, IMHO.

<snip>

> (Tangentially -- could you clarify what mandate you're talking about? 
> It could be the mandate that the Board overrules FESCo.  Or the 
> mandate that FESCo is supreme on technical matters.  Or something else 
> again... I just need some clarification).

For what it's worth (since we're talking about something 4+ years old), 
it was the fact that I wanted the group of folks who were most 
knowledgeable about Fedora's technical stuff making the technical 
decisions, and that group needed to be different from the Fedora Board.

That doesn't mean the Fedora Board, or its individual members, are never 
allowed to state an opinion about something technical, or to make a 
request, or to try to flesh out an idea and build consensus around it. 
But it means that we're trying to build an engineering/engineering 
services department (to use the corporate metaphor) that has its own 
authority and power.

The job of Red Hat's board of directors is not to build products and 
technologies themselves, but to make sure that the resources and 
structure exists for the company to hire a bunch of smart people and 
give them the power to build products and technologies (with some 
boundaries and oversight).

I think the metaphor is similar in a community like Fedora, with two 
exceptions:

(1) You can't force anyone to do anything.  Actions are taken because a 
group of people agree on a vision, or because someone accepts and 
respects the leadership position that another has either been elected or 
appointed to and chooses to trust their judgement.

(2) In Fedora, the same person can occupy many roles.  Someone can (in 
theory) sit on the Fedora Board, and on another leadership committee, 
and also be the one doing some piece of work.

--Max, who found another laptop charger