[Request for Comments] Governance change for Fedora Project

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 10:57:36AM -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 10:49 AM, Matthew Miller
> <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 03:02:56PM -0400, Ben Cotton wrote:
> >> product we labor to produce. The questions that arise are: "how active
> >> should the board be?" and "how do we structure the board such that it
> >> meets this need?"
> >> My concern is that we're addressing the second question before
> >> addressing the first. We don't know where we're going, but we know how
> >> we're going to get there! The thread on board-discuss back in
> >
> > In the Flock session, we came to very quick consensus that a significantly
> > more active board was desirable, and since we all basically agreed, we
> > decided to move on to the next part. (That doesn't mean that that's a
> > completely forgone conclusion, just that there was no point in us belaboring
> > it in the room when there wasn't any opposing view represented.)
> 
> Perhaps it would be worthwhile to explore why this was the consensus.
> 
> I worry about "leadership as elected function".  I also worry about
> confusing "governance" with "leadership".
> 
> My opinion: leadership is emergent behavior, and governance is
> filtering behavior.
> 
> Leadership happens when a person sees a problem that needs to be
> solved, looks around and don't see anyone solving it, and then takes a
> deep breath and steps up and says "I think we should solve this
> problem, and here's what I'm going to do about it."
> 
> Governance happens when people are competing over scarce resources --
> time to implement ideas, space on the home page, money for events --
> and someone needs to decide who gets what resources.
> 
> Is the consensus that Fedora needs more governance, or more leadership?

It's the second in my opinion, but with regard to the Board the issue
is more nuanced.  In the olden days, the Board membership was drawn
from the emergent leadership.  As a result the members collaborated
actively with each other and the rest of the community to make things
happen, and to make (hopefully) informed decisions.  As was mentioned
in the session at Flock, our method of forming the Board hasn't been
successful at making that connection between leadership and
governance.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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