Board Composition Proposal

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Aug 2010, Jesse Keating wrote:
>
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>> On 8/17/10 10:16 AM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>> >> > My what a paranoid view you have.
>> >> >
>> >> > Also, I rather take offense that you consider a more conservative
>> >> > approach to updates to our stable releases counter to the "roots" of
>> >> > Fedora, particularly when you consider that Fedora is rooted in Red Hat
>> >> > Linux.
>> >> >
>> > Thanks for being excelllent!
>> >
>>
>> I'm sorry, I'm trying to be excellent, however I cannot put myself in
>> your shoes to see your viewpoint.
>>
>
> I'm a little confused too.  I don't see anyone from FESCo saying they'd
> like to do X but haven't been allowed to because of the board.  But I'm
> not sure if that's what he's advocating or not.
>
> Some of the positions Toshio has taken seems to say he'd prefer to see
> FESCo be the exception to our normal organizational structure in that it
> shouldn't report to the board (unlike all the other bodies).  I could be
> wrong.
>
> Toshio, would you mind maybe re-stating what you're proposing from an org
> chart view?  Or maybe correct me if I'm completely misreading you.  Email
> is the worst possible format for discussions like these :(
>
So I've had a few discussions with people that will hopefully give me
better language to say what I mean here :-)

1) Part of this is historical.  As Max stated earlier in this thread,
the Board and FESCo's relationship was originally setup a bit
differently because FESCo had actively been a community body that was
doing great things in the realm of Fedora Extras before the merge and
before the Board's existence.  In setting up the Board, FESCo kept
much of its old powers and responsibilities even though the Board was
theoretically a higher power.

2) In some ways, I saw (and I think some others saw) the Board as an
extension of the FPL.  The FPL was delegating duties and
responsibilities to a partially community elected entity so that 1)
The FPL wasn't a single point of failure, 2) the decisions weren't
being made solely by one person.  However, there are expectations of
the FPL that I, at least, thought of as transferring to the Board as
well but others obviously do not.  In this case, the expectation that
a good FPL is there to advise and guide but unless their actions are
going to sink the ship, lets the people doing the work control their
own destiny.

So if you look at this historical view, you'd have co-rulers of which
one is the junior partner.  Maybe an org chart like this:

                            == Board ==
== FESCO ==            |   ||
          ||                        |   ||
          +-----------------+   ||
          ||                            ||
 == Other bodies ==      ||
                              == Bodies with no FESCo oversight ==

Where double lines are a strong, hierarchical relationship and single
lines are more of an advisory capacity (but with the possibility of an
overruling veto if need be).


Now -- this is not to say that this is the way things should be.  We
could change this and make FESCo definitively underneath the Board in
a strict hierarchy.  But if so, I think we should state with certainty
what the relative duties and responsibilities are and where people who
want to effect change need to focus their time and energy.  Do you
want to change the update strategy?  You should go to the Board
because they take ultimate responsibility for making changes that
affect the end users.  Do you have a complaint to file about a
maintainer abusing their provenpackager status?  That should go to
FESCo because they take care of specific cases where there's already a
policy laid out.  I think that there's both documenting and untangling
to be done here -- and because most of this was unwritten, there's an
opportunity to throw out and revise some of the unwritten rules (and
maybe some of the written rules) along the way.

Leaving things in the current state where I have a different idea of
what FESCo's role versus the Board verus the FPL than you than Jesse
than Kevin Kofler is probably the worst state of affairs.

-Toshio