Board/Project Governance

[Jeremy Katz]

Did someone ask for a wayback machine?

So the original existence of the Fedora Board came from the fact that we
were creating and incorporating a 501(c)3 corp in the form of the Fedora
Foundation.  Part of the rules for governance of such an organization
include having a board with people in very specific positions (ie, I was
the secretary and might still have the Official Stamp somewhere in a box).
 As we dissolved the foundation[1], we kept the board and it was the only
"governing" body of Fedora.  And more importantly, the board served as the
"external group conscience" to provide leverage and a good conduit for
things to get back to inside of Red Hat at the time.

There was no FESCo or anything else... those came later and were partially
driven to exist by the fact that the Board had a lot of "Red Hat" seats.
 Also, early on FESCo was purely about Extras (the E was for Extras, not
Engineering) and couldn't drive big changes that rippled throughout
technically.  The merge of Core and Extras obviously changed that and the
role of the Board has continued to get murkier and murkier ever since.

</historian>

That said, if someone were to come and ask me if the Board makes sense in
its current form today, I would say probably not.  While the trademark,
copyright, etc stuff is important, is there significant benefit being had
by having those discussions in the Board as opposed to just someone like
Robyn?  Also the real questions for the future of the Fedora are, as they
have almost always been, technical in nature and best driven by those doing
the lion's share of the technical work.  Accept and empower that group and
I think a lot of good will happen.  </soapbox>

- Jeremy

[1]
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05/departments/fedora_status/#fedora-foundationand
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2006-April/msg00016.htmlare
both good historical reads.


On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 6:36 AM, Robert Mayr <robyduck at fedoraproject.org>wrote:

> 2013/9/11 Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com>:
> > 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.
> > josh
>
>
> Hi Josh,
> when I read your proposal I said 'yes, that's a good idea' and I still
> agree with all you wrote in your mail.
> Having representatives of every group in the Board could help to let
> the teams work easier together, and we'd have the guarantee to have
> every single group within the Board to discuss also specific issues.
> On the other hand most of the Board members actually would remain on
> their seat (as you pointed out), so we are already doing well with the
> nominations/elections process. Changing the process therefore wouldn't
> revolutionize the Board members, but we would have for sure a better
> definition of how to compose the Board also in the future.
> Just my two cents in this discussion.
> Greetings.
>
> --
> Robert Mayr
> (robyduck)
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>
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