Board Composition Proposal

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 1:47 PM, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Getting more people to run is one of the reasons I want to do this. I
> do not believe Toshio is the only person choosing to not run because
> of the current structure .

Remind me again... who is Toshio's employer?

And I'm really not sure its appropriate to make significant governance
changes on the _belief_ that a significant group of  qualified
_external_ volunteers are withholding candidacy based on the existence
of a minority of appointed board seats.  Do you _know_? Lets get
people on record and be _sure_ we know why people aren't running
before we project our own feelings about governance onto the
situation.

I'll tell you why I haven't run again as an external volunteer... my
job status changed and I'm doing significantly more travelling to far
flung places on the planet with diminished ethernet capacity.  And as
a result of that lifestyle change I cannot in good concious run for an
elected position which would require attentiveness. As much as I'd
love to be part of a phone meeting while in McMurdo Station just to
waste the satellite bandwidth, its not appropriate use of US tax
dollars.

I personally have zero issue with having 4 appointed seats, 2 rotating
out with each election period.  I personally have zero issue with the
FPL having veto power. But I do have an issue with the assumption that
more elected seats automatically means more external members being
voted in.  Right now we have more externals eligible to vote and to
run for seats and yet we are consistently voting in Red Hatters at a
higher proportion that would be expected by their percentage of
membership in the voting contributor base. You need to understand that
this means that as we add more elected seats the probabilities are
such that we are going to continue to vote in more Red Hat people as
seats open up.  If they goals are to increase external participation
in governance more elected seats is not a clear way forward on that
goal.

Be clear about the goals... and pick implementations that strive to
achieve those goals and are informed by the data we have in hand. What
I fear is happening here is that there are a lot of unfounded
assumptions being made about elected positions being intrinsically
better than appointed positions and I take issue with that.  I've seen
no reasoned argument so far set forward that would suggest to me that
moving to more elected seats is a way forward to mitigate any
particular concern.

-jef