Appointment of Board Members.

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 07:09:47AM -0700, John Poelstra wrote:
> Toshio Kuratomi said the following on 08/13/2010 01:48 PM Pacific Time:
> > Notes:
> > * In the Max Spevack era, the Board was pushed away from making decisions
> >    for two reasons: 1) FESCo was deemed to be the body that understood the
> >    technical issues at hand and therefore the body that should make most of
> >    the decisions regarding Fedora.  2) The Board was not all elected and
> >    therefore didn't have as much of a "mandate from the people".  In the Paul
> >    Frields era, the Board started to make many more decisions.  I don't think
> >    that's necessarily a good thing as they've trampled all over reason #1
> >    above but being fully elected would help to alleviate reason #2.
> 
> I don't recall things going down this way.  Please name some concrete 
> examples of this "trampling" so we can be discussing the same thing.
> 
The first example of it that I can think of was at the transition between
the Max Spevack and Paul Frields eras with Codeina.  Here's some pointers
from the middle to mid-end of that:

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2008-March/005032.html
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2008-March/005054.html

Since then, there's been the pieces of the Board vision that have been about
technical aspects and implementation.  For instance, the Target Audience
discussion and outcome:
  http://lwn.net/Articles/358865/

(btw, I was unable to find this written up on the wiki -- stickster, is that
on purpose or is it there somewhere that I can't find it?)

And the whole updates vision piece:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Stable_release_updates_vision

What's the common thread in these?  Here's my subjective "History of Fedora
Governance".  I feel that at the start of Fedora, there was a cabal of
engineers working on getting things done so that we could have
a distribution.  This became formalized into FESCo which we see now.  In
these early days we also had Fedora Project Leaders with gradually
increasing power.  They did work coordinating resources within Red Hat,
selling Fedora to influential people within Red Hat, helping to mediate
disputes within the community, branched into media relations, and gradually
took on the role of managing and representing the Project as a whole.  In
order to keep power from becoming too concentrated, the Fedora Project Board
was formed which took on some of these duties for the FPL.

These examples all have the Fedora Project Board crossing over from
restricting itself to decisions about the Project as a whole into making
decisions about the Fedora Distribution.

But that's perhaps inevitable.  George Orwell put it impolitely as "All
power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely".  Perhaps a way of
phrasing this without the negative connotation of corruption is: "Power
tends to grow into a vaccuum".  To me, it seems that FESCo has been giving
up a lot of its duties, responsibilities, and powers and the Board has been
absorbing them.

One way to deal with this is to give those powers back to FESCo.

Another way would be to merge FESCo and the Board.

Not sure which of those is best at the moment.

-Toshio
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