[Fedora Base Design WG] Initial committee proposal and selection reasoning

Phil Knirsch pknirsch at redhat.com
Mon Oct 28 13:20:21 UTC 2013


Hi everyone.

As FESCO appointed me last Wednesday as the coordinator for the Fedora 
Base Design WG i wanted to start reaching out as soon as possible.

The first task of a coordinator is to select and present the initial 
voting committee for the WG, chosen from the volunteers on 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora.next/WG_Nominations and add that 
to the corresponding fedora ticket 
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1170

My approach and criteria for the selection was as follows:

a) Include as many community members as possible as their representation 
in the volunteer list was already rather low and we really wanted to get 
at least 50% community members in there.

b) create a committee that consists of a wide range of skills and areas, 
including engineering, rel-eng, qe, program mgmt, product mgmt and 
security at the least.

For a) the problem was that if you look at the Base Design WG volunteer 
list i only saw 3 people from the community in it. 2 of them were 
already taken by other WGs as members and FESCO strongly discouraged to 
appoint one person to multiple committees. That left me with only 1 
potential community member, Jon Disnard. I learned on late Friday though 
that he's working for Red Hat now as well, but he's the closest we can 
get to a community member.

For b) i was going through the list of volunteers and wanted to make 
sure to get that broad representation while still having a deep 
technical representation for key parts of the Base product: Kernel, 
security and init.

This lead to the following list of people who i've contacted 
individually first to make sure they would be willing and able to be 
part of the committee.

Dennis Gilmore: Very obvious rel-eng choice i think :)

Harald Hoyer: My personal choice for a systemd/udev/dracut 
representation, other choice would have been Lennart

Jaroslav Reznik: also pretty obvious Program manager to ensure we take 
care of all scheduling/planing questions appropriately

Bill Nottingham: Old schooler with a huge and broad knowledge about all 
packages and tech in Fedora. Engineering generalist basically for the 
"Big Picture"

Jon Disnard: (Ex)-Community member, ARM representation & Fedora 
Ambassador in one. :)

Dan Walsh: Mr SELinux, obviously for security included. Other choice 
would have been Miloslav Trmač, but he's already a member of the Server 
WG committee.

Josh Boyer: TEH kernel guy in Fedora. Again, obvious kernel 
representative here.

Subhendu Ghosh: Product manager extraordinaire, my choice due to his 
capabilities for product visions and how things in a perfect world 
should look like.


Unfortunately the only person from QE was Jóhann B. Guðmundsson, but he 
is already a committee member in the Server WG. Same goes for 
infrastructure where Kevin Fenzi is as well in the Server WG already.

That being said, this would be one of my first agenda items for our 
first WG meeting after FESCO approves it or requires some changes to the 
setup on Wednesday:

  - QE representation via Adam Williamson as a non-voting committee member
  - Infra representation via Kevin Fenzi as a non-voting committee member

In order to meet the quite short deadlines for governance drafts mid 
November by FESCO and to get the ball rolling i've contacted all members 
with an initial email to get started prior to FESCO approval of the 
committee. Here the full email i sent out:

--------------------- snipp here -------------------------------

Hi everyone.

I would like to welcome you all to as the members of the Fedora Base 
Design working group committee.

As we'll have quite a bit of work ahead of us, i'd like to start right 
into it even before FESCO officially approves this WG committee next 
Wednesday.

I've already created a very brief tasks list ahead of us:


Fedora Base Design WG topics & tasks
====================================

  - Meeting time & day
  - QE representation via Adam Williamson as a non-voting committee member?
  - IRC channel & mailing list
  - Governance draft
  - Define what Base means and what it consists of:
    o More than minimal, less than base/default
    o No services? sshd? Users? basic system configuration above 
cpu/memory/storage/network?
    o Release schedule & supported lifetime (keep 6 months, extend, 
rolling, etc
    o RPM and/or yum resp. dnf?
  - Coordinate with other WGs so that Base actually provides the 
platform they need

So the first step really is to agree on a time and day at least once a 
week where we can meet on IRC to progress and discuss the other topics.

Also, this list is of course far from complete, so just let me know what 
you'd like to have added to the agenda for the future and i'll take care 
of that.

Same goes also for the definition of what Base is, this is just a 2 
minute from the top of my head random thoughts, so i'd like to invite 
everyone to spend a few minutes yourself on this topic and think about 
your top 5-10 items you'd like to see us cover in our discussions about 
what Fedora Base is all about.

Let's make the <3 of Fedora awesome together!

Thanks & regards, Phil

------------------ snipp here ----------------------


Jon then took the ball and sent out an initial day/time proposal for 
Thursday 17:00 - 18:00 UTC. Unfortunately some people won't be able to 
make that time and day, so Josh Boyer then proposed to use 
whenisgood.net to make sure we get the best possible time for that.

Thats is so far, i'll do my best to communicate as often and as much as 
possible about the progress. And as many others have already said and i 
really want to chime in on that: If you want your voice to be heard: 
join the meetings of the committee. Everyone is welcome there and will 
be heard, as this is about all of us, and now is the chance to make a 
change and for you to influence the future of Fedora.

Thanks everyone!

Regards, Phil

-- 
Philipp Knirsch              | Tel.:  +49-711-96437-470
Manager Core Services        | Fax.:  +49-711-96437-111
Red Hat GmbH                 | Email: Phil Knirsch <pknirsch at redhat.com>
Wankelstrasse 5              | Web:   http://www.redhat.com/
D-70563 Stuttgart, Germany


More information about the devel mailing list