Spins

[Adam Miller]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 03:36:05PM -0500, Paul W. Frields wrote:
>> Having the Board or any other group decide conflicts on an ad-hoc
>> basis doesn't scale.  I'd predict that would lead to an increasingly
>> jerry-rigged final product that works more poorly for everyone.
>> Setting direction and focus is what the Board was created to do.  It
>> may not be possible for every single person to be 100% happy at the
>> end of the process, but the goals (in order) should be to establish
>> that direction, and then ensure that contributors have freedom to try
>> things outside of it.  Where there is a conflict, the first goal has
>> to win out, just as with our freedom principle for instance.
>>
> I disagree with some of this. I think that it is exactly the mission of the
> Board to decide conflicts on a somewhat ad-hoc (but not arbitrary) basis.
> If the people who are doing the work set direction and focus, they are
> delineating where they are going to take the people using their product.  If
> people who are not doing the work set direction and focus, they are setting
> forth limitations on what is possible.  Legal issues and clarifications of
> how to apply free software principles to corner cases are areas where the
> Board should be setting forth limitations.  Resolving conflicts between two
> sets of contributors is also a limitation in that it tells the sides how
> they must interact with each other to get back to business (this could be
> telling one side they must give in to the other but hopefully the Board
> members looking at the problem would be able to find a middle ground in
> the specific problem).
>
> As for my distinction between ad hoc and arbitrary -- I agree that the Board
> should be resolving conflicts from general principles (thus, not arbitrary).
> But the decisions should be made for actual problems that exist, not by
> creating a vision by which your project can be judged when youdeviate from
> it.  My issue with the target audience and Board created vision ideals are
> that the Board is then making decisions based on how it affects the target
> audience or whether it fits into the vision they (or a past Board) had for
> Fedora.  Before reaching that point, I would argue that the Fedora Project
> would be better served by addressing how the Board's decision maximises the
> ability of the current contributors who are involved to do their work better.
>
> -Toshio
>
> _______________________________________________
> advisory-board mailing list
> advisory-board at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
>
>

I agree completely with Toshio. I don't even have anything to add or
comment on. Many thanks Toshio.

-AdamM


-- 
http://maxamillion.googlepages.com
---------------------------------------------------------
()  ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail
/\  www.asciiribbon.org   - against proprietary attachments