Fedora vision & more specific goals

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 21:50, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 11:27:23PM -0500, Max Spevack wrote:
>> On Wed, 17 Nov 2010, Max Spevack wrote:
>>
>> > * Someone said this to me the other day, and I can't remember whom,
>> > sorry. Speak up if you're the smart one.  The Fedora Board should meet
>> > face to face for a few days twice per year.  Those days should be
>> > organized in advance using FAD best practices, and they should be
>> > intensive working sessions where the Board lays out and advances most
>> > of its agenda for the coming chunk of time.  The Fedora Project has
>> > sufficient budget to enable this.
>>
>> Hey new board,
>>
>> Any thoughts on this?
>>
> I'm too new to know but.... what would the Board hope to achieve at these
> sessions?  To me, an ideal Board would work by creating consensus for an
> initiative among the people who are needed to do any work to make the idea
> a reality... that portion of the Board's work would be better done in
> non-Board-oriented FADs.  Laying out at a high level what the Board wants to
> see accomplished might be one thing that could happen at a FAD.  But is that
> any better accomplished in person than via email/phone/IRC?  If we're
> exploring an idea in depth, I can see that being the case.. but perhaps we
> should decide that we need to meet in person on those on a case-by-case
> basis just like any other FAD?
>
> Once again, I'm new here, so I don't know whether the Board would benefit
> from a recurring in-person meeting, I just don't have a clear idea of what
> we'd want to achieve by meeting.

The main things I believe we need to work out face-to-face is beyond
the board. A face to face with FESCO+FAMSCO+Board to iron out a better
governance and charter so that we can give clearer direction. I have
seen multiple meetings all around where one group (FYYY) says "Oh cool
we should do this" and others say "Wait isnt that FXXX job really to
do that sort of thing?" and the reply back of "Well I guess but w e
can at least .... " which usually starts a longer and larger pain
train as FXXX thinks FYYY is a make work group and FYYY wonders why
FXXX is just pushing back. Or you have something where FYYY should do
something but things it should get FXXX's approval, look, guidance,
etc and what comes back after a long delay is "What just do whatever"
which then somehow soon goes to a variation of the first part.

1) Face to face meetings are needed because non-facial communication
only scales so well and we have no clue if the other person is
throwing monkey poo, being funny, or not realizing that asking for a
modest proposal on Irish babies is rather tasteless.

2) A formal charter of some sort is needed because what we have as a
wiki and some documents does not scale for larger than 60-120 people.
After that size some human brain automatically makes some other person
a non-entity at some point in the conversation and people have no idea
where they stand. It doesn't matter if the people know and work next
to each other.. once their brains start taking in the fact that their
overall group is larger than X (where X is some built in variable per
human brain) they require more formalized rules.

Basically, people who want less rules and bureaucracy can only get
away with it in smaller groups. At some size we don't scale complexity
linearly any more and it all goes to hell. [Humans suck for community
building.. but they won't fund my T7000 project to replace them.]

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



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren