Appointment of Board Members.

[Robyn Bergeron]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 07:09:47AM -0700, John Poelstra wrote:
>> Toshio Kuratomi said the following on 08/13/2010 01:48 PM Pacific Time:
>> > 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.
>>
>> I don't recall things going down this way.  Please name some concrete
>> examples of this "trampling" so we can be discussing the same thing.
>>
> The first example of it that I can think of was at the transition between
> the Max Spevack and Paul Frields eras with Codeina.  Here's some pointers
> from the middle to mid-end of that:
>
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2008-March/005032.html
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2008-March/005054.html
>
> Since then, there's been the pieces of the Board vision that have been about
> technical aspects and implementation.  For instance, the Target Audience
> discussion and outcome:
>  http://lwn.net/Articles/358865/
>
> (btw, I was unable to find this written up on the wiki -- stickster, is that
> on purpose or is it there somewhere that I can't find it?)

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_base is probably what you are looking for.

>
> And the whole updates vision piece:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Stable_release_updates_vision
>
> What's the common thread in these?  Here's my subjective "History of Fedora
> Governance".  I feel that at the start of Fedora, there was a cabal of
> engineers working on getting things done so that we could have
> a distribution.  This became formalized into FESCo which we see now.  In
> these early days we also had Fedora Project Leaders with gradually
> increasing power.  They did work coordinating resources within Red Hat,
> selling Fedora to influential people within Red Hat, helping to mediate
> disputes within the community, branched into media relations, and gradually
> took on the role of managing and representing the Project as a whole.  In
> order to keep power from becoming too concentrated, the Fedora Project Board
> was formed which took on some of these duties for the FPL.
>
> These examples all have the Fedora Project Board crossing over from
> restricting itself to decisions about the Project as a whole into making
> decisions about the Fedora Distribution.
>
> But that's perhaps inevitable.  George Orwell put it impolitely as "All
> power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely".  Perhaps a way of
> phrasing this without the negative connotation of corruption is: "Power
> tends to grow into a vaccuum".  To me, it seems that FESCo has been giving
> up a lot of its duties, responsibilities, and powers and the Board has been
> absorbing them.
>
> One way to deal with this is to give those powers back to FESCo.
>
> Another way would be to merge FESCo and the Board.
>
> Not sure which of those is best at the moment.
>
> -Toshio
>
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