Board/FESCo mission/vision FAD

[Robyn Bergeron]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 8:13 PM, Jon Stanley <jonstanley at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just a little bit ago on the Board's private list, the idea of a few
> FAD's, funded by CommArch, was brought up. There's no reason to keep
> this secret, so I wanted to bring the discussion over here :).
>
> I think that both the FESCo and the Board are in agreement that we
> have some very challenging short term issues to solve that would
> benefit from face to face meetings between the relevant groups (but
> not necessarily restricted to them). I'd generally try and push stuff
> like this off to FUDCon, because that's part of what it's there for,
> but these needs are more immediate than that.

... is there a timeline that these needs are on?

>
> First thing that we need to do is set an agenda, of which I think
> there are two main tracks:
>
> 1) FESCo/Board empowerment - currently neither FESCo nor the Board
> have resources that are actually at their disposal to make their
> respective visions happen.

I hate to read into this here, but did that more or less read, "At the
Board and FESCo FAD we need to discuss how to empower
ourselves"....????????

What resources are needed? How do you know that the Board lacks what
they need to make a vision happen when there is not a vision clearly
agreed upon?

I think there are a lot of activities that people in the community
have proposed which would have great value on their OWN as FADs.
Including people wanting to have better statistics - can we do a FAD
to make that happen, so that we can make better decisions? Jon Masters
has proposed, as I have been for, oh, a year, doing end-user
surveying.  I think the results of both of these activities would shed
a lot of light onto things like Vision and Stable Release Vision.  I
cannot stress enough the value of involving community members in the
process of the strategic planning and vision outlining we are doing.
Without buy-in from the community, we go nowhere.  We have people who
want to have their opinions valued, and their work to have an impact
on Fedora's future.  The information that can be gleaned from these
activities is extremely valuable as far as talking about execution of
vision, and even development of vision - I don't think we should
short-change, undervalue, or ignore what people can contribute in the
way of assisting in planning out where Fedora is going.

An agenda I would like to see for a FAD involving a joint meeting of
the Board and FESCo would be more along the lines of: Let's decide
what we're MISSING to make decisions.  Let's figure out how we can
involve the community in solving those missing details, so we can make
rational decisions.  Let's figure out how we get buy-in.

Then let groups go off and have FADs to figure those things out.
Circle around with all the information at FUDCon, and come up with
something solid, something where people understand the underlying
details of why we need to do what we're going to do.

> 2) Implementation of a "stable release vision" - but this sort of
> hinges on the first item - without resources to enforce a policy, what
> good is it to have one?
>
> We need a few things in order to have this FAD be successful
> (paraphrasing Max here):
>
> 1) A clear, actionable objective for people to focus on with a
> deadline (I think that I've named that in the two items - someone
> correct me if I'm wrong)
> 2) The right people - we can't block on people that are not present.
> 3) A dedication to documentation and remote participation so that
> people that can't be there but are concerned about the topic (which
> for this would be A LOT of people, I'm sure :) ) can have input into
> the proceedings and not have the results trapped in a few people's
> heads.
>
> In terms of logistics, I think that it makes sense to have this FAD
> around Boston - there's a critical mass of Board/FESCo people around
> there, as opposed to anywhere else, but I'm open to anything. Heck,
> I'd love to have it in NYC so I don't have to travel :).
>
> Anything else I've missed?

You'd probably want to start a wiki page.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Template:FAD

-Robyn

> _______________________________________________
> advisory-board mailing list
> advisory-board at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
>