The "Membership" section of the governance charter draft

[Máirín Duffy]

Hi folks,

One discussion we didn't get to finish in today's meeting was the
membership section of Jóhann's governance charter draft. As stated
during the meeting, he felt having this cross-section of Fedora would
"ensure coverage and proper release process for server product."

The draft link is here, for convenience:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Johannbg/ServerWG

After the meeting I went back to the Fedora.next proposal to see what it
says about membership in the working groups and read this:

"There will be at least one FESCo member in each to act as a liaison.
There should be a liaison with the QA, rel eng, docs, marketing, and
web/infrastructure groups as well although these may not be people from
those teams but people tasked with facilitating dialogue between those
groups and the working group instead."

Jóhann's proposal seems to follow the spirit of this (adding the design
team as a group needing representation; thank you for that. :) ) With
that in mind I've changed my position on this matter a bit, and I would
like to hear your thoughts on this proposal:

- The proposal says we would continue to have nine voting members, but
then talks about there being a member each to represent 7 Fedora groups
and 3 additional members to represent the server community itself. I
think the representation of the server community itself is too slim
here, and I think the slots could overlap.

- I would like to propose instead that we maintain a nine voting member
roster, but require that at least five of the members be able to
directly represent the server community. By this, I specifically would
like to require any or all of the following requirements be met by a
'server community' representative (under which all of our current
'server community' reps and other members qualify as well):

  - member has worked professionally as a system administrator for a
deployment of at least 10 production servers
  - member has been involved significantly as a contributor to an
enterprise Linux distribution or enterprise management product for Linux
servers.

- Instead of having each of the cross-section teams across Fedora (docs,
rel-eng, QA, ambassadors, infra, design, marketing) have a member of
their team directly serving in the Server working group, I would like to
suggest instead following the Fedora.next proposal suggestion that each
of these teams have a liaison on the working group who isn't necessarily
a member of the team they represent. So, for example, Stephen could be
the liaison for the Fedora marketing team even though he is not a member
of that team, and whenever the working group needs to interface with
that team it would be Stephen's responsibility to contact them. So each
team has a 'go-to' person on our working group, and our working group
has a 'go-to' person for each team we'd need to interface with. To have
the same person managing the relationship could simplify communications.

- In order to determine who is the liaison for which of the 7 groups,
for now we could go with people who are a member of the groups are the
liaison and groups that do not have a member on the working group would
have a member not already a liaison for another team nominated to be
their liasion. When someone who is the liaison for a given Fedora team
leaves the group, that group will be given the opportunity to suggest a
replacement but the decision as to who to pick would ultimately be up to
the remaining members of the working group.


With this proposal in mind -

I am still not sure how the turnover works. Do we serve until we're sick
of serving, or is there a term / period we are on and then are up for
re-elections? The draft does not cover this really.

Anyway, let's discuss :)

~m