Board/Project Governance

[Máirín Duffy]

On 09/11/2013 10:57 AM, Josh Boyer wrote:
> The overall lack of commenting really kind of baffles me still.  Now I
> can't tell if it's simply apathy, "silence means agreement", or some
> kind of boycott.

Silence means agreement in my case.

"What does the board do?" is something I wonder myself. I served on the
board (half a term), all gung-ho and ready to help make positive change
happen. Instead, it was a really demotivational experience for me - so
much so that the negative effects still linger on in the form of an
apathetic rain-cloud over my head that I never carried before wrt
Fedora. (Before I had a happy pony rainbow.) It burnt me out, almost
irretrievably so.

Really - and I hope I'm not being horrifyingly unfair to the fellow
board members I shared a term with, I don't think fault lays with
anybody - it didn't seem like the board did much of anything:

- Any time an actually interesting discussion came up, it had to be cut
short for time and tabled ad nauseum.

- IIRC a lot of the board discussion also centered around what the board
should do! That is too navel-gazey for me.

- There was a lot of rubber-stamping of things that were obviously fine
to rubber-stamp and needed it for TM reasons or whatnot (mostly
approving Fedora community domains.)

- Then there was a lot of rubber-stamping of things that were going to
happen irrespective of whether they received the board's rubber stamp or
not, which seemed pointless to me.

The board doesn't have any authority to step in and fix things when they
are broken, in the case that the members are actually of the same mind
as to what to do. Instead, they can politely ask people to do things,
but have no authority to actually tell them to do it, kind of akin to
Milton standing in a crowded conference room asking quietly if someone
could please give back his red stapler.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHHZBmF8mk4

I like to get things done, and make things happen, and that is not
something that I felt happened enough when I was on the board.

>From the other side - and maybe this is where I developed the false
impression that the board actually does things - before I became a board
member, Ricky, Sijis, and I were 'commissioned' by the board to redesign
Fedora's web presence. It was a three-phase project that involved the
design of spins.fpo, get.fpo, fedoraproject.org, and fedoracommunity.org:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Website_redesign?rd=Website_redesign_2009

It was nice in that when we needed the board to provide us things in
order to get the design done - say a target audience - we told them what
we needed, and they went and made that happen and provided it to us, and
we used that in the design. The whole process actually was kicked off by
a single post mmcgrath made to the fedora-users list, there's a summary
I wrote recently for quaid here:

http://iquaid.org/2013/09/04/defining-self-identity-for-an-open-source-project-how-did-fedora-do-it/comment-page-1/#comment-7254

While slow, that seemed functional to me. So maybe I was given the
impression the board was functional when it usually isn't. Or maybe the
term I was on the board was a particularly bad one.

Of course, that process wasn't perfect. While the board gave us a target
audience for the design, for example, not all groups agreed with that
particular target audience, and the design received a lot of snipes at
the time from those who have a very different idea as to what the target
audience should be. It's sat and basically bit-rotted in place over the
past 3-4 years. I think for the time it was a nice lipstick on a pig,
where the pig is the actual distro - *not* because it's ugly, but
because governance its various aspects is a bit of a mess so if you dare
go near it you're wresting with the zombies of those who tried and
failed before you any time you try to touch it. The website is safe and
landmine-free and its governance and control is pretty straightforward.

Here I was going to link to a picture of Indiana Jones and the skeletons
in the big temple place where he got the grail in the last crusade, but
I can't find one so you've been spared. But yeah. You can't get the
grail, but you can go wild landscaping the path to it all you want.

Anyway maybe if board members were functional it would help, at least a
little bit. E.g., if I was on the board (I don't want to be) as someone
on the design team, it would be easier for me to know how to approach
the design team and find folks to get things done, just the same if
someone from marketing or ambassadors was on the board and those groups
needed to be approached to get something done. Perhaps this change could
increase the potential for getting things actually done. (Not to say
that the people on the board don't do things, it's just they don't
always map nicely out to the teams that do things in such a way that
there is always someone representative of a group that needs to be
approached)

Although, to be fair, I've been involved in non-FOSS non-profit work and
it seems their boards suffer from similar issues that I'm ranting about
here.

My excuse for this mail is that I got 5 hours of sleep last night; I'm
very sorry,
~m