Appointment of Board Members.

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 10:34:53PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Toshio Kuratomi (a.badger at gmail.com) said: 
> > > I also recall some occassions where it was argued 
> > > that FESCo should be more involved in the day to day direction, creation 
> > > and development of the distro and yet the response from some FESCo 
> > > members was that they already had too much to do and couldn't take on more.
> > 
> > Sure -- but the proper response in an empowered FESCo would be to delegate
> > the work that they have out rather than the Board to take it upon
> > themselves.
> 
> Delegating implies directed resources that FESCo can delegate *to*.
> I don't know that we have that in any real manner. (There's the FES
> tickets, but even that's best-effort.) I suppose there's FPC, but there's
> very little FESCo can delegate to when it comes to things like 'create
> this feature' or 'write this software'. You could say we delegated AutoQA
> to the QA group, but I'm not sure that actually made it happen any sooner.
> 
For instance, delegating the Feature approvals to the Feature Wrangler.

Delegating approval of the Packaging Guidelines to the FPC.

FESCo chooses to take those burdens directly instead of finding ways to push
them out to others.  They're mature processes now, there's nothing really
innovative in either process, it's just refining the process.  Both of those
systems have people outside of FESCo who drive the processes and are capable
of taking the next step in the road towards doing it without FESCo's direct
involvement.

If the reason that FESCo wants to give its historic powers and
responsibilities to the Board is time.... I'm just pointing out that there
are things that take up FESCo's time but really don't need to.  FESCo can
certainly decide that they are happy with that role and that that role fills
up its available time.  But if that's the case we should be telling people
that the Board is the place to have innovative discussions about the future
of not just Fedora, the Project, but also Fedora the Distribution.  We
should be letting the Board make technical decisions.  And we should let the
people who work on Fedora have a much greater ability to see what the Board
does and influence the direction of the Board because it impinges much more
on their day-to-day Fedora duties.

In the past I have been much more in favor of FESCo getting more power back
than simply canonifying the current status of the Board's powers and FESCo's
powers because the Board is ill-setup to meet the needs of the community
working on technical matters.  Conference calls rather than IRC meetings
that can be watched concurrently with doing work, doing much of its work in
private, being only half elected.... these are all ways in which FESCo is
a better vehicle for representing and responding to the needs of the Fedora
Developer Community.  But if FESCo doesn't want these powers back and the
Board is happy to step into that role, then we should simultaneously
officially recognize that the Board is the place to take these issues and
remedy the issues that make the Board less than ideal ground for those
decisions nad discussions to happen.

> > Electing people to FESCo in order to make a difference only to have the
> > Board telling those decision makers what to do puts everyone under stress
> > because of false expectations.  You once said that you didn't understand why
> > fesco existed since it just seemed like middle management so let's really
> > evaluate this -- maybe FESCo is middle management and we have no reason to
> > elect them.  Or maybe we really do want them to be more than that and
> > therefore we should make sure that they have both the power and the
> > responsibility to do that.
> 
> Speaking as a FESCo member, I find far more frustration in general
> sniping and noise from random (or not-so-random) community members than
> from anything the Board does.
> 
I find far more frustration in having people in power talk about noise and
sniping than about any of the comments that people without power repeat over
and over again.  When a community member is rude enough times, you learn to
ignore their outbursts and temper tantrums and only read for the actual
content that they have (if they generally have any).  When a leader of our
community decides that they can label members of the community's well-meant
messages as sniping and noise, you start to wonder if they're really doing
a good job  building consensus, getting people with conflicting viewpoints
to talk to each other, and most of all, whether they're listening to you or
not.

-Toshio
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