[Ambassadors] Red Hat's investments (was Re: Going passive)

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 17:10:36 +0100,
  Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
>      4. Others are not officially stepping down but simply resigning. I
>         don't want to name any names. 

Some turnover is normal. The question is are we losing more good people
than we are gaining?

>      6. We hardly have any community members that are willing to run for
>         the board or Fesco. 
>      7. We have nobody to coordinate the elections. 

I need a break after dealing with Spins SIG for the last year. In the Spring
I will either run for a FESCO seat or volunteer to help with some aspects
of the elections.

>     13. 2 Red Hat employees who never contributed to Fedora were
>         suddenly given commit access to more than 800 packages without
>         previous notification to the package owners. Thanks God this was
>         revoked. 

That was a misunderstanding. Someone mistakenly thought they had the OK
to give them access to packages in a group.

>     14. Other package owners got a formal letter from Red Hat that they
>         had to hand some of their packages over to Red Hat employees as
>         they were to become part of RHEL6.

If there is such a policy, it really should be documented. And my preference
would be that it would be minimally intrusive, giving only update access
rather than transferring ownership. On the other side, people need to remember
that being a package owner, doesn't provide you with your own personal
feifdom. The packages are jointly owned by the whole project.

>     15. The board defined a new target audience without the community.

I disagree with that statement.

>         We (e.g. the spins SIG) were given a bunch of questions, we
>         replied to them and asked questions in return. We never heard
>         back from the board until they came up with their new target
>         audience.

Spins SIG is dysfunctional. What it really is, is a loose collection of
SIGs (or in some cases individuals) that design spins.

>     17. We need to have a "Community Working Group" to fill the gap
>         between the board and the community, but the members of the
>         working group are not elected by the community but appointed by
>         the board. 

This is an experiment. I would expect in the long run, if it is successful,
that there might be other ways of selecting people other than appointment.

>     18. Volunteer contributors have to wait for decisions from bodies
>         like FAMSCo, the board or FESCo. 

I would expect this to be the case for some things. Are you really saying
that volunteers should be able to do whatever they want? Or perhaps you
mean people are being held back in areas for which it doesn't make sense?

>     19. Volunteers are not getting the support they need from the people
>         who are getting paid to work on Fedora. 

Fedora has a shortage of good people, to do all of the things we are trying to
do. There is more to do than there are people to do it, both people getting
paid and volunteers. I do think there is a problem here, but I don't think
it is something to blaim on Red Hat.

>     20. We have more and more red tape that makes live hard for our
>         contributors.

Personally, I like to see more attempts to introduce process into the way
Fedora does things. We are too big to have everyone just winging it.
I think Poelstra's efforts have been great and hope his replacement is as good.