[FAmSCo] My FAmSCo goals - please help!

[Christoph Wickert]

Hi there,

Jiri already sent a mail about his goals last week [1], and you may
wonder what all this is about. So before I tell you a little bit about
my goals, let me tell you a little bit about where this idea comes from.

At the end of 2010, the Fedora board decided to agree on "strategic
goals" for Fedora, so they can focus their work in 2011. When we looked
back at what had happened with these goals one year later at FUDCon
Blacksburg, we realized that hardly anything was achieved [2].

The problem was that the goals were noble, but very abstract and
progress was hard to measure. It was impossible to really reach them and
for an individual, there was not much to do as every problem required a
lot of people to overcome it.

So we decided to try something different. Each board member picked their
own goals. Something to work on and something that can be achieved. We
don't tell anybody what do to or let, but by championing our own goals,
we lead by example. Every board member is to show the community what
they want to work on and how they approach a problem. This can encourage
others to help or to work on their own projects.

As FAmSCo chair, I suggested that we do the same for all FAmSCo members.
I told everybody to pick 2-3 goal and present it on the ambassadors
mailing list.  Our goals don't necessarily need to benefit the
ambassadors, but of course it would be nice if they did.

Here is what I have come up with so far:
     1. Improve budget management: We want to make payments for our
        contributors easier and faster. Budget needs to be more
        transparent. We want to move decisions from FAmSCo to the local
        communities.  Reporting for credit card holders needs to become
        easier. We are working on all this for a while already but
        hardly made any progress, because there are big changes inside
        of Red Hat. It is unclear who will manage our budget in the
        future and we don't even have exact figures of our spending in
        the last year. So as soon as there is some progress, we can
        start working on this. We already set up a new trac instance
     2. Improve the elections: I have been spending a lot of work on the
        new FAmSCo election guidelines and I want to continue with this
        because I think there is still a lot to be improved. Even if we
        have the best guidelines ever, we can improve, participation ,
        documentation and the process. My goal is to have one simple and
        streamlined election process for the whole Fedora project.
     3. Solve conflicts about local communities: As FAmSCo chair, I
        received a lot of mails about conflicts in various local
        communities. I was asked to make a decision, but frankly
        speaking I cannot. I am willing to help and to act as a
        middlemen, but it is not on me to decide who gets a certain
        domain or not. Instead of solving these conflicts one by one it
        is better to think about how we want to deal with them. Maybe
        the Fedora community working group can help? I don't know, but I
        continue to work on it.

If you like my ideas, I would appreciate your help. If you don't like
them, I am looking forward to your feedback. And if you have more ideas
how to make the Fedora community a better place, lets discuss them.

Kind regards,
Christoph

[1]
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2012-June/019854.html
[2] 
http://www.christoph-wickert.de/blog/2012/01/15/board-goals-2011-retrospective-and-what-we-can-learn-for-the-future/