On 10/30/2013 08:54 PM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Hi folks,
One discussion we didn't get to finish in today's meeting was the
membership section of Jóhann's governance charter draft. As stated
during the meeting, he felt having this cross-section of Fedora would
"ensure coverage and proper release process for server product."
The draft link is here, for convenience:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Johannbg/ServerWG
After the meeting I went back to the Fedora.next proposal to see what it
says about membership in the working groups and read this:
"There will be at least one FESCo member in each to act as a liaison.
There should be a liaison with the QA, rel eng, docs, marketing, and
web/infrastructure groups as well although these may not be people from
those teams but people tasked with facilitating dialogue between those
groups and the working group instead."
Jóhann's proposal seems to follow the spirit of this (adding the design
team as a group needing representation; thank you for that. :) ) With
that in mind I've changed my position on this matter a bit, and I would
like to hear your thoughts on this proposal:
Actually FESCo revisited the requirement of one of it's member having to
be a member of each WG ( with the exception of the initial one of course
) to just there has to be appointed liason.
- The proposal says we would continue to have nine voting members,
but
then talks about there being a member each to represent 7 Fedora groups
and 3 additional members to represent the server community itself. I
think the representation of the server community itself is too slim
here, and I think the slots could overlap.
Actually that was just a counting mistake on my behalf it was always
meant to be nine members.
( mathematically it always has to be made up of odd number anyway to
prevent votes ending in ties )
- I would like to propose instead that we maintain a nine voting
member
roster, but require that at least five of the members be able to
directly represent the server community. By this, I specifically would
like to require any or all of the following requirements be met by a
'server community' representative (under which all of our current
'server community' reps and other members qualify as well):
- member has worked professionally as a system administrator for a
deployment of at least 10 production servers
- member has been involved significantly as a contributor to an
enterprise Linux distribution or enterprise management product for Linux
servers.
There was an attempt in the QA community back in the day where there was
this attempt to have all testers to be required to have RHSA or RHCE
which just laughable so needles to sayI disagree since adding an
requirement like this will never work because obviously you have no way
of actually verifying this in addition just because individual meets set
requirements he still might not be up to the task so to speak or more
likely to be so + adding a requirement like this for participation will
drive away potential contributors.
( those contributors might make up them not meeting the said
requirements by pure enthusiasm and the more experience would just help
guide that energy into the right places )
- Instead of having each of the cross-section teams across Fedora
(docs,
rel-eng, QA, ambassadors, infra, design, marketing) have a member of
their team directly serving in the Server working group, I would like to
suggest instead following the Fedora.next proposal suggestion that each
of these teams have a liaison on the working group who isn't necessarily
a member of the team they represent. So, for example, Stephen could be
the liaison for the Fedora marketing team even though he is not a member
of that team, and whenever the working group needs to interface with
that team it would be Stephen's responsibility to contact them. So each
team has a 'go-to' person on our working group, and our working group
has a 'go-to' person for each team we'd need to interface with. To have
the same person managing the relationship could simplify communications.
- In order to determine who is the liaison for which of the 7 groups,
for now we could go with people who are a member of the groups are the
liaison and groups that do not have a member on the working group would
have a member not already a liaison for another team nominated to be
their liasion. When someone who is the liaison for a given Fedora team
leaves the group, that group will be given the opportunity to suggest a
replacement but the decision as to who to pick would ultimately be up to
the remaining members of the working group.
Actually after going through an PDR I actually come more to the
conclusion that this is more an requirement that we should have and if
we do not we should either exercise this clause in my proposal "If there
are no candidates available, the existing remaining members of the
Server WG will fill the seat by selecting a candidate and approving by
majority consensus." and pump the number of server community members to
11 or 13 ( we are going to need all those people anyway. )
Now having said that after going through an PDR, an PDR cannot be
applied to the server WG since in fact it is the documentation which
will be describing the transition process from an server application
that we ship to an "product" so as I see it the initial server WG is
setting the framework for that as well as pushing 3 products ( to iron
out any issue in that process ) through the transition process and
through that framework.
Ones that has been achieve the role of the server WG will be more
selecting which application to choose next and push it through that process.
With this proposal in mind -
I am still not sure how the turnover works. Do we serve until we're sick
of serving, or is there a term / period we are on and then are up for
re-elections? The draft does not cover this really.
There should be just one election and that's for the server group that
will replaces the initial *chosen* WG after that there should not be any
other elections that's a burden we do not want in a process like this so
we either do as my proposal indicates which is to have each composition
group being responsabile for chosing their member to appoint to their
respective seat by or the individual stepping down selects another
individual to take his place or better yet the remaining members of the
WG choose an individual to take that seat.
Well that concludes my thoughts and comments ;)
JBG