Re: RFC: Organizational Changes – Engineering Service

Mike McGrath mmcgrath at redhat.com
Fri Feb 5 19:09:21 UTC 2010


On Fri, 5 Feb 2010, Bruno Wolff III wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 05, 2010 at 12:07:19 -0600,
>   Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > The problem is we have no such service organization for our OS.  The work
> > gets done by the people that do it (this is good).  Still, some things
> > fall through the cracks and you certainly can't mandate work to FESCo as
> > they have no facilities to do it and the FESCo members themselves can't be
> > expected to do it.  So what I'm proposing is a new engineering service
> > team.  People volunteer knowing they will be told what to do and offer
> > only their time and skill set.  Suddenly FESCo has a directable resource.
>
> For those of us that might volunteer for only a few hours a week, there may
> need to be some latency requirements. (I am not sure how low you are
> going with the number of hours as at some point it's not worth the trouble.)
> But if I were say to volunter for 4 hours a week and I get told to do
> something, how long to I have to do it? Is this time going to be required
> on a weekly basis? Maybe I only want to commit to one day every other weekend?
>

I'd expect this to be a very 'fact' based group.  By that I mean, if I say
I can work 4 hours a week.  I'd expect the work assigned to me to never go
beyond 4 hours a week.  If something gets assigned to you that you can't
do or won't be able to do on time, I'd hope that to get communicated to
the team manager.  Not everything will have any sort of hard deadline.

If a task was assigned to you and you couldn't do it, I'd expect you to
assign back to the manager with a little explanation on why and everyone
in the process would be fine with that.  Saying "I don't know how to do
this" is just as acceptable as "a UPS blew up at work and I won't have a
time for that this week."  Stuff happens, what makes it a problem is if
you suddenly vanish with tasks assigned and they just sit there.

> Is this time expected to be utilized at near 100% on an ongoing basis? (I am
> wondering if this is going to totally conflict with other time committed to
> Fedora for maintianing packages and the like.)
>

No idea, we've never done anything like this before.  But if you can only
do 4 hours every other week, that's an acceptable schedule too.

	-Mike


More information about the advisory-board mailing list