Appointment of Board Members.

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 08:49:02PM -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Aug 2010, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> 
> > * 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.
> 
> Context is important:
> 
> I spent a lot of time as FPL being very concerned about the role of 
> FESCo, and trying very hard to make sure that folks who had been doing a 
> ton of heavy lifting and decision making in Fedora *prior* to the setup 
> of the Board felt like they, their opinions, and their contributions 
> were valued and respected, especially with the merge of Core and Extras.
> 
> I wanted to make sure that the folks who had built and managed Fedora 
> Extras so successfully were still leaders in the technical discussions 
> happening in Fedora.  Thus, s/Extras/Engineering in the term FESCo, and 
> a period of re-discovering what that actually meant.  But the *mandate* 
> was always there, IMHO.
> 
So -- what does that mean for today?

Should we still be pushing FESCo to be the preeminent body for making
engineering decisions, technical discussion, and driving the distribution
since that's the way it was at that time?

Or should we encourage all the people who want to participate as they
did/could have in the pre-merge FESCo to run for the Board instead and
influence the direction of Fedora there since the technical split was only
meant as a stop-gap for the particular people who were on the Board at that
time?

I've spent a lot of time lately, thinking about how much we respect the
opinion of people who are not on the Board.  Or not on FESCo.  Or not on any
committee.  I haven't been too happy with where I think we are but I haven't
figured out how to get to where we should be.  That must be why you were
a Fedora Project leader and I am just an infrastructure coder :-)

Since I don't think we're necessarily in a good place wrt respecting our
community, I'm trying to think of where we're failing and what we could do
differently.  Being clear about what the role of the Board is and the role
of FESCo seems like one place that we're lacking.  Perhaps that's only
getting us treating symptoms or perhaps little steps like making clear that
if you want to change the direction of the distribution you really should be
running for the Board and not FESCo are the way to make progress on getting
the voices of the community heard.

(Tangentially -- could you clarify what mandate you're talking about?  It could be
the mandate that the Board overrules FESCo.  Or the mandate that FESCo is
supreme on technical matters.  Or something else again... I just need some
clarification).

-Toshio
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