Fedora Board Strategic Working Group

[Colin Walters]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 4:15 PM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Conflict of interests.  If the high level group becomes too invested in what
> is happening to a single product that we are making, then the decisions that
> the group makes becomes colored by that focus.  The SIGs that produce spins
> should be defining a target audience but for the Project to be defining
> a target audience is detrimental to embracing contributors who have
> a different vision.

You seem to be ruling out the possibility that there could be
agreement on this target audience.

> The high level group needs to be able to make decisions
> that negatively impact the default distro offering if it helps empower more
> contributors to work on the areas they want to see flourish.

What kind of negative decisions?

> I disagree with this idea of the Fedora Board's role.  I believe that
> vision for the Fedora Distributions should come from the people who are
> presently creating those distributions.

Again, I don't think it makes sense to preclude common agreement on
goals.  And I think that's what the board needs to be doing *as a
participatory* thing.  It's not like the Board is going to inscribe
rules on stone tablets and hand them down to everyone with a FAS
account.

The goal should be to define a target that we can agree on, and work
on meeting that target using rough consensus and working code.

> My question would be -- why is it the Board's purview to decide what the "Gnome
> desktop"'s target audience should be?  Shouldn't that be up to the SIG that
> creates the spin?

A general purpose desktop image consumable is very important for the
project as a whole; I don't have any metrics to back this up, but I'm
sure it's what most of the people using the project now want.

Backing up a bit - this discussion is quite abstract.  Let me ask a
distilled question - do you see it as a fundamental problem if the
Board works to define a target audience at all?  Or you just don't
like the proposed definition work so far?