Board/FESCo mission/vision FAD

[Jon Stanley]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 12:30 AM, Robyn Bergeron
<robyn.bergeron at gmail.com> wrote:

> I hate to read into this here, but did that more or less read, "At the
> Board and FESCo FAD we need to discuss how to empower
> ourselves"....????????

This is a hard question - that's sort of what we're doing. FESCo
actually has this problem today. I simply expanded the scope to
include the Board, since I know for a fact that I can't tell anyone "I
think this is important, please work on it" and have the request have
any sort of weight. This was really geared more towards developer
resources. If you take a look at
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/fedora-board-meeting-27-august-2010/
you'll see that it was noted that FESCo has no resources to direct,
and there are possible solutions there. We just need to flesh out what
they are, who's responsible for it, and move forward.

We also need to clearly define the roles of both the Board and FESCo -
I think there's some divergence on what each group thinks that the
other exists for and is responsible for. We need to nail this down
once and for all, and move on.

Also note that I don't expect my pet problems to be resolved simply by
directing somebody to do it - that would obviously not be in the
spirit of community.

>
> What resources are needed? How do you know that the Board lacks what
> they need to make a vision happen when there is not a vision clearly
> agreed upon?

Right now I can't get someone to *change a light bulb*, let alone make
some sort of strategic direction a reality, whatever that may be. I
think that vision needs to be fleshed out as well.

> I think there are a lot of activities that people in the community
> have proposed which would have great value on their OWN as FADs.
> Including people wanting to have better statistics - can we do a FAD
> to make that happen, so that we can make better decisions? Jon Masters
> has proposed, as I have been for, oh, a year, doing end-user
> surveying.  I think the results of both of these activities would shed
> a lot of light onto things like Vision and Stable Release Vision.  I
> cannot stress enough the value of involving community members in the
> process of the strategic planning and vision outlining we are doing.

While I agree with this, we've been for *years* gathering round in a
circle and singing "Kumbaya". At some point something needs to get
done, and we need to set a deadline.  We need to say that "coming out
of this FAD, we're going to have a vision, and a method to implement
that vision". That's not to say that we're going to enact such there,
but we'll at least have a more viable framework than we do now for
refinement based on community input.

Also note that attendance (either in person or remotely) at such a FAD
would *not* be restricted to simply Board/FESCo members. We're surely
not some form of secret society that makes decisions without the
advice of those impacted by them.

> Without buy-in from the community, we go nowhere.  We have people who
> want to have their opinions valued, and their work to have an impact
> on Fedora's future.  The information that can be gleaned from these
> activities is extremely valuable as far as talking about execution of
> vision, and even development of vision - I don't think we should
> short-change, undervalue, or ignore what people can contribute in the
> way of assisting in planning out where Fedora is going.

I 100% agree with all of that. Max holds the purse strings to holding
a FAD - note that in the message that started this thread on the
board-private list, and Max reposted here, he specifically said he's
not against the idea of holding 3-4 useful FAD's around this. Sounds
like you've just proposed another, maybe 2. Get on organizing them -
realizing of course that you're hugely busy with FUDCon organization
efforts, you might want to find someone to as well :)

> An agenda I would like to see for a FAD involving a joint meeting of
> the Board and FESCo would be more along the lines of: Let's decide
> what we're MISSING to make decisions.  Let's figure out how we can
> involve the community in solving those missing details, so we can make
> rational decisions.  Let's figure out how we get buy-in.

I'm not certain that anyone is MISSING anything they need to *make*
decisions.  What both groups (FESCo to a greater extent, really) are
missing is a method to make those decisions a reality.

> You'd probably want to start a wiki page.
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Template:FAD

Thanks for the pointer, was wondering where the template was :).  I'll
probably get around to this tonight if no one gets it before me.