[Request for Comments] Governance change for Fedora Project

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 01:38:06PM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 20:20:59 +0200,
>  Haïkel <hguemar at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> >Dear contributors,
> >
> >Following the current discussion about governance, a proposal to
> >change the governance model of the project has been made during the
> >"Governance for Fedora.Next workshop" in Flock Prague 2014.
> >We request your feedbacks about before considering its adoption or rejection.
> 
> The description seemed pretty vague about how people get on the council. My
> impression is that the FPL picks from people who want the job according to
> what the FPL thinks will work out.
> 
> That isn't necessarily bad. But if the intention is that there be a more
> formal selection process, I think a better description is needed.

I thought this came out in the discussion notes that Haïkel linked.
But the concept was that the FPL would have the broad ability to
select each seat from among a subset of the Fedora community.  This
would encourage representation from different parts of the community.
The idea was not that every single team would provide a
representation, because this produces too large a group for decision
making.

> I do think there is a risk in an FPL picking whoever they like. There is a
> risk of getting some isolated group think that may not see things the same
> way as significant number of other contributors. I think that FPLs will need
> to make sure they get a good mix of views when they pick this group.

Yes, this was also discussed.  It's incumbent on the FPL to be open
and interested in healthy debate in the community and the Board.  At
the same time, though, to have the Board be more active and involved
takes some coherence of direction.  Otherwise we end up where we are
now.

> Is this new process going to put more stress on FPLs or less? Our FPLs seem
> to burn out pretty quick, so it would be nice if the intention for this
> process was to do a lot of delegation. Making the FPL job harder would not
> be a good idea.

Matt was an active participant in the discussion, and I think he would
have mentioned it if he feels this change would cause him more of a
burnout problem. ;-)

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
    The open source story continues to grow: http://opensource.com