Appointment of Board Members.

[Bill Nottingham]

Toshio Kuratomi (a.badger at gmail.com) said: 
> > We could do that in some sort of subcommittee. However, if there is supposed
> > to be technical review for appropriateness, notification of other people that
> > might be affected, coordination, and so on, I'm not sure that delegating it
> > to someone who's primarily process-and-tracking oriented is best.
> > 
> Ideas:
> * Have the Feature Wrangler assemble a team
> * As you say, have a subcommittee that deals with it
> * Similarly, form a SIG (with a seed committee from FESCo) to deal with it.
> * Have the Feature Wrangler make decisions on some of the checkpoints --
>   while the initial submission of the feature is supposed to give fesco
>   a chance to say, no, don't do this at all because it's technically a bad
>   idea, Feature Freeze is intended to be there to ensure the feature has
>   reached testable state which is more about tracking and 

tracking and? 

These are all decent ideas - any chance you want to pick the one you like
best and write it up? My main objection was just to delegating to the
singular wrangler.

> Does the contrapositive of "as long as FPC states they want FESCo to approve them,
> we will"? hold true?  ie: "if FPC states that they only want FESCo to
> approve specific guidelines, FESCo will follow FPC's desired workflow"?

As far as I'm concerned, yes. I can't speak for all of FESCo, though.

> Normal people on the list should ignore them. -- If your post was about
> feeling that normal people are listening to the sniping and noise too much
> then that's my answer.
> 
> Elected representatives have a duty to listen to people, even when they
> don't like what's being said.  And they have a duty to tease out the facts
> from those messages.

I understand what you're saying, but there are often times where there's
not a lot of facts in the messages, or what facts that there are are
obscured by requests that are completely infeasible. For example, I
understand that Kevin would like to use LZMA squashfs to fit more stuff
on the live image, and he's frustrated that he can't use that in Fedora
yet. But the request that the various Desktop SIGs should just override
the kernel maintainers wishes and our 'use upstream' policy and commit to
support, possibly indefinitely, a non-upstream ABI in the kernel... that's
about as close to a complete non-starter as you can get. Or, to pick another
example, there's a 20-message thread about the evils of Javascript and
why no one should use it, we should disable certain browser support for it,
etc.  While you're elected to represent, you're also elected to use your
good judgement on proposals, ideas, and so forth.

> Which, perhaps, shows that elections are a bad idea for Fedora?  Or at least
> parts of Fedora?  Perhaps the Board should be 100% elected (to represent the
> contributors) but FESCo should be structured more like rel-eng, fes, and
> infrastructure where people show up to do work.  Or perhaps *FESCo* should be
> appointed for their technical expertise.
> 
> Do you see FESCo's primary role as being representatives of the contributors
> whose core directive is to empower them to make Fedora?  Or do you see
> FESCo's primary purpose as a body that keeps the distribution on-track,
> figuring out new ways to produce a high quality distribution?

I'm not sure that's an either-or distinction. Is there a reason it can't
be both?

Note that these threads started with the idea that having more elected, as opposed
to appointed, board members gives them greater legitimacy in the community
(among other things). I'd suspect that moving to an appointment method for FESCo
would give them *less* legitimacy in some people's eyes. Given that FESCo enacts
policies for contributors to follow, that would seem to be a bad combination.

Bill