Fedora vision & more specific goals

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 04:40:50PM -0700, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 21:50, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 11:27:23PM -0500, Max Spevack wrote:
> >> On Wed, 17 Nov 2010, Max Spevack wrote:
> >>
> >> > * Someone said this to me the other day, and I can't remember whom,
> >> > sorry. Speak up if you're the smart one.  The Fedora Board should meet
> >> > face to face for a few days twice per year.  Those days should be
> >> > organized in advance using FAD best practices, and they should be
> >> > intensive working sessions where the Board lays out and advances most
> >> > of its agenda for the coming chunk of time.  The Fedora Project has
> >> > sufficient budget to enable this.
> >>
> >> Hey new board,
> >>
> >> Any thoughts on this?
> >>
> > I'm too new to know but.... what would the Board hope to achieve at these
> > sessions?  To me, an ideal Board would work by creating consensus for an
> > initiative among the people who are needed to do any work to make the idea
> > a reality... that portion of the Board's work would be better done in
> > non-Board-oriented FADs.  Laying out at a high level what the Board wants to
> > see accomplished might be one thing that could happen at a FAD.  But is that
> > any better accomplished in person than via email/phone/IRC?  If we're
> > exploring an idea in depth, I can see that being the case.. but perhaps we
> > should decide that we need to meet in person on those on a case-by-case
> > basis just like any other FAD?
> >
> > Once again, I'm new here, so I don't know whether the Board would benefit
> > from a recurring in-person meeting, I just don't have a clear idea of what
> > we'd want to achieve by meeting.
> 
> The main things I believe we need to work out face-to-face is beyond
> the board. A face to face with FESCO+FAMSCO+Board to iron out a better
> governance and charter so that we can give clearer direction. I have
> seen multiple meetings all around where one group (FYYY) says "Oh cool
> we should do this" and others say "Wait isnt that FXXX job really to
> do that sort of thing?" and the reply back of "Well I guess but w e
> can at least .... " which usually starts a longer and larger pain
> train as FXXX thinks FYYY is a make work group and FYYY wonders why
> FXXX is just pushing back. Or you have something where FYYY should do
> something but things it should get FXXX's approval, look, guidance,
> etc and what comes back after a long delay is "What just do whatever"
> which then somehow soon goes to a variation of the first part.
> 
> 1) Face to face meetings are needed because non-facial communication
> only scales so well and we have no clue if the other person is
> throwing monkey poo, being funny, or not realizing that asking for a
> modest proposal on Irish babies is rather tasteless.
> 
> 2) A formal charter of some sort is needed because what we have as a
> wiki and some documents does not scale for larger than 60-120 people.
> After that size some human brain automatically makes some other person
> a non-entity at some point in the conversation and people have no idea
> where they stand. It doesn't matter if the people know and work next
> to each other.. once their brains start taking in the fact that their
> overall group is larger than X (where X is some built in variable per
> human brain) they require more formalized rules.
> 
> Basically, people who want less rules and bureaucracy can only get
> away with it in smaller groups. At some size we don't scale complexity
> linearly any more and it all goes to hell. [Humans suck for community
> building.. but they won't fund my T7000 project to replace them.]
> 
I could definitely go for this.  it is though, rather than a bi-yearly
meeting, an in depth FAD on Governance.  So I still don't know that we
should arbitrarily say that we should meet every six months but this sounds
like a good topic to hold a FAD on.

-Toshio
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