Fedora Board election results

[Jeff Spaleta]

> On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 08:39 -0500, inode0 wrote:
> Another thing that might help is maybe a pre-election statement from
> the board to wrap some context around an election. What has the
> current board accomplished? What are the major open issues the board
> is currently dealing with? Then the candidates rather than saying "I'm
> going to work to make Fedora great!" could actually address some of
> the outstanding issues directly. Without some focus on issues that
> need to be addressed what are we really to base votes on?

What if most of what the Board has to deal with, revolves around legal
issues that can't be talked about transparently?  There is a reason
why the Board calls and lists are private.

There is an unspoken assumption here, that being on the Board gives
you some amount of new ability to work on fedora community facing
items or issues. It does not.  The crap that I have to deal with as a
board member is exactly the crap that noone would ever want to plan to
do as part of their pre-election statement.  We try very hard to limit
what we are doing inside the scope of the Board calls and private list
to items which need to be in the Board calls and private list.

The only new ability being on the Board grants is being able to use
the position on the Board to get conversations started outside of our
existing community.  So since Jesse is interested in 3rd party
packager relations, being able to say 'I'm on the Board' might buy him
a modicum more respect so he can get his foot into the door for
conversations.

Paul continues to chide me when I use the board list instead of
driving what I am thinking about to public spaces.  Everything
interesting that anyone can come up to do inside the existing
community can be done without the Board having any say in unless there
is a legal aspect that must be considered.

I can not stress this enough.  If there is an important issue that
someone wants to drive, then they should do it, regardless of whether
or not the Board has officially blessed the idea.

When Matt and Jesse and I were at FUDCON this winter, and we got into
a fist fight over the issue of source distribution requirements, Matt
and I went off and explored what it would take so that people could
rely on our VCS to regenerate srpms on demand.  The fact that Matt and
I were on the Board had absolutely nothing to do with that attempt to
find a solution to the issue.

The reality is that as an official body, as issues bubble up, the
Board reacts.  The Board is there as an arbitrator when individual
subgroups get stuck or policies and processes break down.  Because of
the semi-private nature of the board communications we do NOT want to
make too many decisions. We are much more excited to ratify polices
and ideas worked out in the open by subgroups in the full project
umbrella, because each of us on the Board individually want as much
transparency as possible.  The Board is there as a construct to deal
with the crap that we can't do transparently and as such that
construct should not be abused.

If you want to see the next election be issue oriented. Then I think
asking the sitting Board to explain the issues of importance is
utterly wrong. It's not in my best interest as a candidate to tell
other candidates what they are suppose to say.  The community needs to
tell the Board and the candidates what the important issues should be.

Most likely the sitting Board will decide the person bringing up a
specific issue is right and it does needs addressing and will empower
and task that very same person with addressing it, leaving nothing for
the new candidates to talk about.

In fact we need to community to be doing that on a regular basis,
telling us what the issues are. Hold our damn feet to the fire.  What
we need is a way for people in the community who perceive that there
are issues needing more attention to talk about those issues.  I
thought this list was meant to be exactly that resource, but maybe its
not, maybe we need something else.

-jef