Board reorganization proposal

[Matthew Miller]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 09:24:54AM -0500, inode0 wrote:
> * Regarding the Diversity Advisor, it is a bit hard to comment without
> knowing anything specific about who would fill this role but assuming
> it is a diversity specialist of some sort I do not think that role
> should be a voting member of this body but am fine with it being an
> advisory member where things the body is considering impact diversity
> issues.

I would like the role to be actually meaningful, not just a token. That's my
concern with labeling it as only advisory. With the consensus model,
negative votes need valid explanation, and I wouldn't _expect_ those votes
outside of the intended scope of the role. Do you think that needs to be
codified?


> * Regarding the general composition of this body I see this resulting
> habitually in a body almost entirely composed of Red Hat employees
> with the possibility of one or two contributors who don't work full
> time on Fedora participating. While this likely has some practical
> benefits furthering the goals of the project it feels to me like an
> admission of defeat in the big picture. I already hear "Why would I
> contribute to Fedora, that is like working for Red Hat for free?" and
> I fear the message this structure will send to potential contributors
> will reinforce that feeling making it even harder for us to develop a
> community around this project. Perhaps getting more exciting stuff
> done will create a more interesting place to contribute too. So I'm
> not totally negative about this but I am not a big fan at this point
> either.

I share this concern, and I'd love to hear any suggestions for addressing
it.

Asking for a more active board _is_ asking for a bigger time commitment. I
think we need that. These aren't necessarily all new full time jobs,
especially when the model of involving people who are already involved is
taken into account, but it does call for a number of hours every week — and,
the more, the better able to do the job fully.

Fedora is in a unique position, as we do operate independently, and keeping
that meaningful is valuable to everyone involved — yet Red Hat is both our
only non-individual sponsor _and_ the biggest direct beneficiary. I would
love to see more partnerships where people are funded by non-RH employers to
work part- or even full-time on Fedora, but because of the close Red Hat
relationship, that's extra difficult. For many open source projects,
"community" means getting multiple big corporations to jostle for positions.
That's never going to be Fedora. I don't think that's the concern that
you're talking about here, though — it's more the contributors who _don't_
have the luxury of being paid to work on Fedora.

It's important to recognize that when we say that Red Hatters are part of
the community, this isn't just a lip-service slogan about corporate
goodwill. I think this might be another way in which Fedora is unique, in
fact. While Red Hat does pay a couple of dozen of us to work on Fedora full
time, the majority of Red Hat contributors to Fedora are doing it in
addition to their main duties, and in fact a large number contribute to
parts of Fedora completely outside of their job, just like any other
community member with non-Fedora full time employment.

So, to me, in some ways, what needs to be protected is the ability of
non-full-time contributors to have a meaningful say. It might just be,
though, that being directly _on_ the board isn't the right place for that,
and we need to instead set it up so the board can receive, recognize, be
responsive to, and meaningfully reward that input.

-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader