Lessons Learned

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 22.03.2007 09:30, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> On 22.03.2007 03:12, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>>> I asked several times in fedora-devel list and fedora-maintainers list 
>>> without any consensus.
>> That's why FESCo and similar committee's exists, to find the consensus.
>> In this case I'd even said that could have been found in less then ten
>> minutes in a meeting.
> If we have to go to a committee before getting consensus on a simple 
> page rename we have failed in a pretty big way.

Moving quite a lot of important pages IMHO is no "a simple page rename".

>> Okay, so that means that everyone/everyone involved in the website
>> content can go to the wiki now and move some things around where they
>> would like them to belong? Interesting approach. To you really want that?
> I did not just go into the website and start renaming pages all of a 
> sudden. The discussions around reorganizing them was initiated by me 
> months back and I have tried several times again to form consensus.So 
> your description of what I did is pretty misleading.

Those three lines from me above were not a description of what you did.
They were meant to outline the problems such a approach afaics can have .

> I dont think go to 
> FESCo is the right answer here at all.

I strongly think it would have been.

>> P.S.: Sorry Rahul, but this kind of behavior is in my humble opinion
>> exactly what you should *not* do when you are a Red Hat employee. We
>> afaics want to get the community more involved in Fedora; but from the
>> outside this and similar stuff looks like "well, I tried to ask the
>> community, but they didn't find a consensus so I simply made what I
>> think is right without asking anyone again". That is totally the wrong
>> way to get the community involved. If you want to let the community do
>> work for the project you have to give them the feeling they are involved
>> in important decisions.
> I am part of the community just the way you are. Artificially separating 
> this as a Red Hat or board vs community thing is very much damaging and 
> insulting to the work we do in our own time.

Sure, in an ideal world it would make no difference. But it is a
difference. I think as a Red Hat employee you need to be a bit more
extra careful. Fedora has the fame of being Red Hat controlled, and that
IMHO what many people fear. So we IMHO need to work a bit against that
to show "Okay, Red Hat has control over the Fedora Board, but the Red
Hat employees these days just act like any good community citizen would
do and go through the committees that were set in place to give the
community some control over Fedora".

> If folks are bothered about 
> the change so much the right place to discuss this would have been as a 
> reply to my announcement to fedora-maintainers list.

It was not that important so I choose to stay quite. Then this
discussion involved in a direction where that issue was a perfect example.

> No one in FESCo did 
> and now you claim that this is somehow damaging the community involved 
> which I find unnecessarily dramatic. If you are making a personal 
> opinion that's fine. If you are speaking for the community in general 
> you need to be sure that more people carry the same opinion in this matter.

I was speaking for myself and the impressions I got. That why the part
above starts with "in my humble opinion".

CU
thl

/me will probably step away from this thread now, this doesn't lead to
anything productive afaics...