Fedora Board Recap 2011-10-18

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Jared was writing up a response to all this but he must be putting out other
fires atm since I haven't seen the reply yet.  Which may be an indication
that where we're really failing is in getting an elections wrangler that has
more time to devote to election wrangling.

I'll include some commentary below but note that I'm just trying to pull out
thoughts that the Board had in passing -- I doubt that anyone is married to
the comments I'm going to give -- the election wrangler for the current
cycle of elections (in this case, jsmith) has authority here.

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 08:28:59PM -0700, Robyn Bergeron wrote:
> On 10/19/2011 03:47 PM, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> > Is this only for the board elections or also for FESCo and FAmSCo? I see
> > different timelines in Robyn's taskjuggler files at
> > http://rbergero.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-16/f-16-ambassadors-tasks.html
> I'm not sure. I'm expecting that when the announcement about the 
> schedule does come (during the 19th-21st, and of course, it's already 
> the 20th in some parts of the world), that maybe that will be clarified 
> for those of us not on the phone call, since I don't see any details 
> about it in the IRC log where it was originally discussed.

This was not mentioned on the phone call.  I thought we had mentioned it in
the IRC meeting and someone had expressed a desire for elections to all be
held at the same time to avoid contributors having to vote multiple times.
I don't think the Board would have a problem if we can't get the elections
to line up at the same time, it would just be desirable.

> 
> Beyond that: I think the schedule looks fine, save for the fact that 
> things like the Questionnaire wrangler collecting questions on the wiki 
> isn't listed here, only getting answers, and we've normally had a full 
> week to deal with that. It could run concurrently to nominations being 
> open, but it would probably help to have it on the schedule.
> 
Yeah, good catch.  We've gotta remember that otherwise we'll get to that
point in the schedule and not have it done.

> So in short, questions:
> * Is this change intended to be permanent? Or will it change every time? 
> (This determines how I'll adjust the schedule.)

At the moment, it'll still change release to release.  The IRC conversation
had ideas on how to make it permanent.  We did not discuss those ideas at
the phone meeting; just nailed down when to do this election cycle.

> * Is this Board-only, or are FAmSCo and FESCo also included?

As expressed above, I think the desire would be for everyone to match up but
the election wrangler, fesco, and famsco should talk to each other for the
actual answer.

> * Is someone going to announce this stuff before the 21st? We're already 
> done with the 19th.

We'll see if jsmith gets it out today.  If not, then it's a definite sign
that we need more delegation here.

> * Is there intent to have time added for questions gathering for 
> questionaires?

There needs to be.  If questions aren't collected then there's no questions
to have answered.

> * Is someone going to address the specifics of why the dates were 
> changed in a public mail?
> * Can we please, in the future, address scheduling changes prior to 
> being in the period where stuff is scheduled to be going on? It really 
> gives the appearance of, "We're changing the dates because nobody did 
> anything." I gather, from what details I can find by reading the fine 
> print in IRC logs, that some of this is to stimulate more participation 
> by not doing everything in crunch time. But having to upend the schedule 
> and code in new dates/lengths (presumably to allow for the thanksgiving 
> holiday, meaning that things will have to be hardcoded from release to 
> release every year) and rebuild the whole thing isn't exactly a fun 
> thing to do during crunch-time either. :)

<irony>Oddly,</irony> that impression seems to match with what I think the
reality is :-/   I think part of it is manpower -- we need to have someone
who commits to run the elections for that cycle well in advance.  Like right
now, trying to find the person who's going to run the post-f17 elections.
The other part is figuring how we want to work this in with the releaae
schedule.  In terms of business that the Board does, I think it could ignore
the release schedule (but not FESCo, etc).  In terms of the business that
potential members of the Board do, the release schedule is quite essential
to work around....  So my personal opinion is that it is best to schedule
the nomination and townhall portion of elections in the period between Fn
release and the start of the Fn+1 feature process.  Which does mean that it 
will change from cycle to cycle as slips happen.

-Toshio
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/attachments/20111021/dccf48c6/attachment.bin