On 01/17/2018 01:06 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 10:54:38AM -0500, Justin W. Flory wrote:
> I've had this message unread in my inbox for some time – I think there's
> a lot of value in Paul's response. During the election discussion at the
> FAD, I'd like to revisit our approach on community engagement, both with
> nominees and the impact on the community.
So, Paul said:
> Deflating expectations around these governing groups would help make
> them feel more accessible and interesting to contributors. After all,
> we're talking about voluntary positions in a free software project,
> not bodies with vast legislative or executive power.
... which is a reasonable point. However, the purpose of the
interviews is actually the inverse. There are some of us who have a lot
of name recognition because the thing we do for the project is
inherently visible — possibly aided by being paid full-time to work on
Fedora. We're loud on mailing lists and visible at conferences. Other
people quietly do a lot of good, hard work but may not have the name
recognition. The interviews are meant to help level that field so
candidates aren't running primarily on recognition.
(That's not to say Famous-in-Fedora people should be _punished_, but I
don't think asking everyone to do an interview is unfair to them
either.)
I understand your POV and I also think it's fair. The intent of the
interviews is to bring added perspective to work others do in the
project, even if it's not highly visible.
However, I also think the current method of interviews is not effective
because:
1) It's a high barrier: not everyone is a skilled writer, and this
might either set them at a disadvantage or discourage them from
running / self-nominating
2) They're not engaging: It's a lot of text we're asking people to
read to cast a vote for three different bodies they may also not
understand
Core contributors may have extra motivation to read all interviews and
spend time thinking about their votes, but I don't think this is the
norm. Civil engagement in the real world is hard enough – I think open
source borrows from the same set of problems.
My purpose in bringing this up is that I'd like to spend time at our FAD
to think about how we can lower the barrier and raise engagement without
setting some candidates at a major disadvantage (because your concern is
absolutely valid too). I'd like to spend time evaluating other
successful communities and see if we can borrow any pages from their books.
--
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
jflory7(a)gmail.com