Meeting Summary / October 30, 2013

Wed Oct 30 20:12:29 UTC 2013

Hi folks!

Below find a summary of today's meeting. You can also read it in blog
format at
http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2013/10/30/fedora-server-working-group-initial-meeting-minutes/
. Below the summary, you'll find the meetbot links if you'd like to read
the raw logs.

Meeting Minutes
===============

Here’s a run-down of today’s Server Working Group meeting:

Agenda
======
* Meeting frequency and times
* Ticket Tracker/Wiki
* Governance Charter
* Open Floor

Meeting Frequency and Times
---------------------------

First we talked about how frequently we should meet and at what time.
This diverged a bit into other topics (how to handle absences and time
zone issues.) We agreed on the following points:

* The Server working group will meet on a weekly basis. There wasn’t any
dissension about or discussion on this point.
* If there is no agenda posted to the mailing list within 24 hours
before a meeting is set to start, the meeting is cancelled and Stephen
will send out a cancellation notice to the mailing list. Jóhann
suggested the cancellation note just so that it’s clear the meeting is
not happening.
* Stephen will send out an email to the voting members to figure out a
time that works for everyone on a weekly basis. It was pointed out that
the United States is going to go through another time shift this coming
weekend, and we’re coming down off a flurry of conference travel with
folks travelling across timezones, so we need to set a time that will be
sustainable long-term.
* In the case where a voting member can not make a meeting, they can
either pre-vote via the mailing list or abstain-by-default. I did raise
a concern about unplanned votes taking place due to a disagreement that
cropped up during a meeting that an absent member could not forsee to
pre-vote on, but we decided keeping things simpler is best, and if that
one vote wouldn’t have mattered anyway it is not a big deal. We’ll wait
until we run into a situation where the absence becomes a problem to
make any policy for it.
* During meetings, silence indicates consent. If people disgaree, then
that will bring it to a vote. As Kevin pointed out, “I think we should
strive to work on consensus, and only vote on things where it’s clear
people aren’t going to be convinced to agree.”

Ticket Tracker/Wiki
-------------------

We then moved on to talk about the tools we will use to conduct business
– managing and tracking our progress. Some of the asset types that came
up as needing to be managed with tools were:

* Working documents (governance doc, PRD)
* Agenda items
* Decisions
* Discussions
* Meeting minutes / summaries

While Stephen suggested initially that we set up a Trac instance to keep
track of agenda items and discussions, several members (Jóhann, David,
Simo) had concerns about prematurely setting up Trac before we had
determined through experience that we needed it. We collectively decided
to table any Trac set up and to use the Fedora wiki to trac agenda
items, decisions, and discussions until it became too unwieldy. At that
point, we would have the experience to fully understand the requirements
of the tool we needed and be able to select a tool based on
requirements. Again, the overarching concern here, I believe, was
simplicity.

I volunteered to start a blog for the group to share meeting minutes and
any progress we’ve made (so here you are. :) ) Initially I’m going to
make the blog posts here on my personal blog, but I will also set up a
group blog for the Server working group on OpenShift and have that
subscribed to Planet Fedora. Meeting minutes will also be posted to the
server mailing list as well as to the Fedora meeting minutes list.

It was very unanimously agreed that the working documents would be
stored on the Fedora project wiki, following the lead of the Cloud
working group.

Governance Charter
------------------

We then moved on to start discussing the governance charter. Jóhann very
helpfully put together a Fedora Server working group governance charter
draft which we read through and used to direct the discussion.

Jóhann’s draft has four main sections:

* Membership
* Current Members
* Making Decisions
* Changing These Rules

While there was a lot of agreement about the content of the other three
sections, there were some concerns and disagreement about the content of
the membership section – enough that the discussion was not conclusive
and we decided that we should discuss it further on the mailing list and
it should be part of the agenda for next week’s meeting.

The main point of contention about the membership section was that there
are certain slots in Jóhann’s proposal meant to be dedicated to specific
teams within Fedora. There were several concerns voiced about this
team-based slot approach:

* Some teams in Fedora are spread thinly enough that they might not have
anyone willing to serve in representation of them. The counter to this
concern that Kevin proposed is that the groups would be given ‘first
dibs’ at nominating someone to fill their slot, and if they couldn’t
then the slot would open up to anybody interested.
* It’s not really clear what advantage having someone from each team
would provide the group – it was pointed out by both mitr and mclasen
that it is easy to reach out to folks on other teams and get help from
them, and being a direct member of the working group isn’t necessary to
assit the group.
* Some of the slots are reserved for people who represent the ‘server
community,’ but it isn’t clear how someone would be identified as
representing the server community or not. What exactly is the server
community? Doesn’t everyone on the working group need to represent the
server community? How can you discern if someone is qualified to do that?
* Miloslav was concerned about this resulting in the group “having a
great planning infrastructure and no one to do the planned work,” and
suggested it would be better if the group was made up primarily of
‘do-ers’ who can get things done rather than decision-makers who would
need to rely on external volunteers to get the work done.

Hopefully we’ll have some discussion about these points and others and
clear up what we think the membership section needs to say.

Open Floor
----------

We only had about 5 minutes left (and went over by 5 more) after
determining the main meat of the governance proposal that we had to work
on was the membership section. We threw out different ideas for loose
threads of discussion and other issues we thought should be considered
for the next meeting’s agenda:

* The governance “membership” section – The ‘membership’ section of the
Server working group governance draft.
* The use cases for the Server product – discussion of this is already
happening on the mailing list. These should help inform the product
requirements document the team needs to put together for January.
* Short-term deliverables and PRD – Kevin suggested that we should start
discussions on the team’s short term deliverables and initial PRD work.
* General direction of how the product will be made – Simo brought up
that we might need to discuss ‘how the sausage gets made,’ e.g., “are we
going to suddenly have 4 different rawhides or how to we handle package
management.” Jim responded with, “I would hope we’re still working from
a common package set, and either putting our changes in the packages or
groups.” Simo concluded that, “I’d like we discuss a bit in the agenda
what we think is the general direction and the ‘absolutely not’ and the
‘absolutely can’t do without.’”
* Mission statement – Stephen suggested, to follow the Workstation
group’s lead, that we put together a mission statement (and potentially
a vision statement.) I’m going to draft the initial statements and send
them to the list for discussion.

Meetbot Minutes
---------------

Here is the official meetbot meeting minutes with links to the full raw log:
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2013-10-30/fedoraserverwg.2013-10-30-17.00.html

Full set of meetbot links:
Meeting ended Wed Oct 30 18:05:15 2013 UTC.

Minutes:
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2013-10-30/fedoraserverwg.2013-10-30-17.00.html

Minutes (text):
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2013-10-30/fedoraserverwg.2013-10-30-17.00.txt

Log:
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2013-10-30/fedoraserverwg.2013-10-30-17.00.log.html