Fedora Board Meeting Minutes - 2010-12-06

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 17:13, Christoph Wickert
<christoph.wickert at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Am Montag, den 06.12.2010, 15:26 -0500 schrieb Tom Callaway:
>
>> - The Board suggests that it may have done a poor job communicating the
>> decided target audience.
>
> BTW: Did the board come up with a definition? I can't find anything in
> the wiki. Is there anything beyond the 4 bullet points Paul mentioned in
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2009-October/msg00350.html
>
>> - It was decided that before any action is taken on this topic, the
>> Board should ask the existing Spins what they want/need.
>
> I think I already listed a couple of very concrete items in the
> "Request: please consider clarifying the project's position on Spins"
> thread. In order to start a more constructive discussion I'm copying
> them over from the old thread:
>
>      * Allow the spins to define their own target audience.

Needs more definition. I would expect that we are using different
words here for the same meaning. To me the target audience for the
LXDE or KDE desktops are people who want to use LXDE or KDE. Since
this does not seem to be the audience you are meaning.. I need more
info.

>      * Allow the spins to ship the software they need for their use
>        case.

Spins can not ship items that are not allowed inside of Fedora. If
they want to do that, they would need to be respins and set up the
infrastructure for it.

>      * Do not block spins or alike with the TLA.

TLA? I do not understand.

>      * Give the spins some more (I'm not saying equal) support when it
>        comes to resources that are shared among all groups. While we
>        certainly can gain more manpower, some things like the space on
>        the DVD, the mirrors or the fpo frontpage is limited and needs
>        to be shared more suitable.

I am not sure what manpower could be given. Red Hat people are shared
resources within Red Hat already.

>      * Make sure groups don't make progress on the account of others.
>        It is not acceptable if one group continuously makes a change
>        that breaks several other spins/programs/desktops.

s/make/break/ ? Also what kind of changes and what things are breaking
things? When talking with Bruno in the past most of the items that
were broken were kernel, kernel, glibc, kernel, firefox, kernel etc.
Does nothing get pushed to rawhide until it has passed some sort of
boot live ? Or some other items (thinking out loud versus trying to
shoot it down.)

>      * Allow the Desktop Live-CD to be called "GNOME Live-CD" or
>        similar in some contexts. I'm not saying that we should get rid
>        of GNOME as the default selection and I think the download
>        options are already very good designed, but in some contexts it
>        must be allowed to call GNOME GNOME, e.g. in the boot menu for
>        the multi desktop DVD. The sleeves of the Live-CD should mention
>        it is GNOME because the term "Desktop Live Media" is the #1 FAQ
>        on events.

This comes up constantly and the word always is "no".  I say this as
someone who has brought it up myself. I can bring it up again at the
board meeting, but I am frankly tired of asking and would rather get
stuff done than fight over it again and again.

>      * When it comes to decision making, make the decisions in time.
>      * Listen to the spin community or the community in general and
>        consult them before making decisions.

Who is this community? Is it the person who just signs up and says
"here is my view"? Is it the person who works hard on the project and
gets things done? If it is one or the other how and who tells? What
'charter' do these decisions and such get made under.

In general decisions get made on time when they are clearly understood
what is being made and who it is effecting. Most of the late decisions
seem to come up from assuming that the problem was understood or who
it was effected was known and then found out it wasn't. In most cases
that means the organization is not scaling and is too large or doing
too much for the amount of time/resources available. Usually there are
two solutions to this:

1) People have to get used to hearing "Tough" more often :(.
2) Things have to be scaled back to what can be dealt with.

[there are other solutions, but usually they fall into 1 or 2 because
scalability, irritability, or other items.]


> Comments?
>
> Regards,
> Christoph
>
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>



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren