Governance vs. Charter

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 6:09 AM, Honza Horak <hhorak at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 11/07/2013 10:47 AM, Jens Petersen wrote:
>
>>> For our governance document, here's the draft I promised at the meeting:
>>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Toshio/Env_and_Stacks_Governance
>>
>>
>> Nice work.
>>
>> It looks reasonable to me on initial reading.
>
>
> Yeah, it does. Although there is one thing I'm not 100% sure about, so I
> think it's worth considering -- Workstation WG uses 2-year terms as a
> serving period in their Governance draft and new members are supposed to be
> elected after that pariod.
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2013-October/008245.html
>
> I understand that continuity is important, but OTOH practically no-limitted
> period could also send a message to the public that we're not open enough to
> accept new (potentially better) members. Thus, any finite election period
> seems a bit better for me.
>
<nod>  The term/selection of members is a point that I think could
definitely use work.  The cloud SIG has the precedent rationale and
the unlimited term but I'm not sure precedent is what we should look
for in this group.  I think it depends heavily on what we decide our
work should consist of.

I think the idea I proposed about us being here to guide new ideas to
a point where they can be taken to the Base Design or live on their
own lends itself very well to a term-limited or elected group.  As
ideas get implemented and grow their own community, the people who
understood it well can move on to lead those groups.  The people who
replace them should be interested in new technologies that are just
starting the incubation process.

On the other hand, during FPC SCL discussions it had been suggested
that the Environments and Stacks WG might be a place to approve or
reject new SCLs.  That sort of body should be very heavily
precedent-oriented (so that two similar cases do not end up with one
approved and one rejected simply due to who was serving on the WG at
the time each went up for a vote).  If we decided that this would be
in our scope I think that the unlimited terms and self-selection from
the committee membership is a necessary match.

(My personal leaning at the moment -- Do not take on the approval of
new SCLs.  Do implement term limits).
-Toshio