Appointment of Board Members.

[Jon Stanley]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 4:24 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?

Writing as an appointed Board member who did not run for election this
term, in the interest of full disclosure.

I believe that there is value to having an appointed portion of the
Board. Whether that's the current 4 or not is up for debate (my
personal opinion is that it's too many). It was not long ago that the
balance was in the opposite direction (4 elected, 5 appointed), and
Paul made it happen to change that. There's probably some wrangling to
do with PHB-types inside Red Hat to make this happen, so I wouldn't
expect a resolution on this in the matter of a day.

Here's why I see there being value in an appointed portion of the Board:

- The FPL consults with the board on appointments at any rate. Perhaps
this process could be made more formal, but it *does* happen.
- Importantly, the appointed seats can be used to balance the
viewpoints of the Board. You'll notice this most prominently in the
second appointment per election cycle, which occurs after voting has
taken place.
- It gives community leaders who may not be as well known an
opportunity to participate. Truthfully, I'm not sure that enough
community members *know* me to get elected to the Board. This is
generally a function of my role as a volunteer - I'm pretty well known
in the areas that I contribute in, but not across a broad
cross-section of the project (this is my opinion, people are free to
tell me I'm full of it :) ).

When you look at the current composition of appointee seats, you can
see a good cross-section of people, from the maintainer of Firefox,
the maintainer of a lot of desktop packages, and two infrastructure
guys. I think that each of us brings a different view of Fedora to the
table, and that could not have been more evident than in today's
meeting. I'm the tinkerer that likes to have all the pieces of the
erector set to put together how *I* like them, while Colin prefers a
cohesive whole. It should be noted that this is *not* a zero-sum game
- we can both have our cake and eat it too. The job of the Board is
to, from as large a cross-section of the community as is humanly
possible, to reach consensus on tough issues like this.

The other question that this raises is the timing of the appointments.
Having one seat appointed prior to the election cycle doesn't strike
me as furthering the goal of ensuring the diversity of the newly
elected Board. The diversity of the current Board can be taken into
account when making the choice, but you have no idea what the
composition of the new board is going to be. Balancing it after the
election seems to me to be the right thing to do.

Sorry for the long-windedness :)
-Jon