Appointment of Board Members.

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 02:24:50PM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>> >From the meeting, reworded to start discussion.
>>
>> Currently the Fedora board is made of 9 members with 4 of them being
>> appointed. What are the benefits of this arrangement, and is there a
>> path where the Board could move to being completely elected?
>>
> Pros of appointment:
> * The FPL can balance out the Board with alternate viewpoints from people
>  who might not be popular
>
> Cons of appointment:
> * The FPL can potentially exert a tremendous amount of power via
>  appointment.  If one issue matters a lot to them, they can get within
>  1 vote of a majority by appointing people who agree with them.
>
> Notes:
> * In the Max Spevack era, the Board was pushed away from making decisions
>  for two reasons: 1) FESCo was deemed to be the body that understood the
>  technical issues at hand and therefore the body that should make most of
>  the decisions regarding Fedora.  2) The Board was not all elected and
>  therefore didn't have as much of a "mandate from the people".  In the Paul
>  Frields era, the Board started to make many more decisions.  I don't think
>  that's necessarily a good thing as they've trampled all over reason #1
>  above but being fully elected would help to alleviate reason #2.
>
> * Basically, the power of appointment gives a lot of power to a canny FPL to
>  push their most pressing agenda items.  Whether this is good or bad
>  depends on whether you agree with the FPL's vision or disagree.
>
> -Toshio
>

And now that I've read the IRC logs, a few comments about the comments
made at the meeting:

== Re: spot: who didn't run because of this? ==
Last paragraph of:
https://anonbadger.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/why-i-havent-given-up-on-fedora-but-wont-run-for-election/

==  Re: jsmith: Red Hat needing to preserve their investment: ==
I think that RH is able to exert a huge deal of power over Fedora
should they choose.  So if the reason to maintain appointed seats is
to reassure RH managers that they have control, you can tell them
these things:

* The FPL always has veto power over things the Board decides
* RH has the power of hire and fire over many of the Fedora Community
* RH controls the purse strings that allow infrastructure's machines,
bandwidth, etc to keep running at its current capacity.

== Re: walters (and to an extent caillon, stickster, others): RH has
no evil master plan ==
Perhaps it's only because I now work inside of Red Hat, but I don't
see Red Hat as the entity that we need to be wary of.  Red hat was an
entity that we needed to be wary of when Fedora was new and we didn't
know whether Red Hat managers would suddenly wake up and decide to axe
our funding some day.

Today, the big bogey man is the FPL, The Fedora Board, FESCo, and the
"unheard majority" of contributors.  In other words, today the entity
we have to protect ourselves from is ourselves and our neighbors in
Fedora.  It's not that we're out to get each other but as mizmo said
in the meeting, that we have different visions for where Fedora should
go.  I think that this exchange struck closest to the heart of our
present issues::

18:18:25 <jsmith> In general though, I think we're probably closer to
agreement on "vision statement/strategy" and less in agreement on
"tactics"
18:18:37 <mizmo> i would disagree with that
18:18:55 <mizmo> there's definitely a consumer camp and a for-techies camp
18:19:01 <mizmo> that do not always see eye-to-eye
18:19:28 <jsmith> Sure... but I'll be honest, I don't think it's a zero-sum game

I think we presently treat Fedora as a zero-sum game where only one
vision can win out.  That's a losing proposition as if one vision does
win out, we're going to lose the hearts of the contributors who had
the "losing" visions.  And that means we're going to have more people
who are just waiting for a better project that can steal there hearts
away to donate their time to which means we'll slowly bleed away the
diversity of talent that we need to be good contributors in the realm
of the kernel and the desktop and the server room and the web.
Instead of trying to fight alternate visions we have to figure out how
to scale and let multiple visions co-exist.

Now, to tie that back into Board Appointments... During the last FPL's
term, the FPL and the Board have increasingly stepped into the day to
day life of the contributors.  Perhaps this is as it should be or
perhaps it isn't ... but one effect of that is that the people who
disagree with the FPL see that he's pushing his vision of Fedora onto
all of them.  If the FPL can't show how their vision of Fedora is not
also included in the FPL's vision, they feel that the FPL is driving
the project away from their needs.  If they care enough about Fedora,
they will, in fact, feel that the FPL is attacking something personal
to them.  In such a situation, you want to do two things: 1) Change
the vision for the Project which requires you to form a coalition of
other people of influence to stand together and work for the
alternative together, and 2) deprive the FPL of his power to continue
his vision that is undercutting yours.

The FPL's power to make appointments to the Board satisfies both of
these subgoals.  It allows you to potentially create more influence by
filling more seats with people who agree with you and it allows you to
deprive the FPL of some of his influence on the Board.

Now here's the other side of that, though.  As I said earlier, as long
as we think that we have a zero sum game and only enough room for one
vision then it's not just the FPL that you might be for or against.
For instance, you might feel that the FPL's vision aligns closely with
your own but a sizable subset of the Fedora packagers don't.  In this
case, you'd feel that those other packagers are working to deprive you
of your baby, your Fedora, and the FPL is helping you defend the
"true" Fedora vision against them.

And as might be obvious by now, I think that I agree with jsmith that
the only way out of this that doesn't force Fedora, the Project, into
eventual obscurity (no matter how popular its Product gets in the
meantime) is to stop thinking of this as a zero-sum where only one
vision can make it in the end.  Where I still have my doubts is
whether we can get enough people to think in terms of enabling these
various visions to co-exist rather than each vision fighting for
supremacy.

-Toshio