The "Membership" section of the governance charter draft

"Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" johannbg at gmail.com
Wed Oct 30 22:05:59 UTC 2013


On 10/30/2013 08:54 PM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> 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:

Actually FESCo revisited the requirement of one of it's member having to 
be a member of each WG ( with the exception of the initial one of course 
) to just there has to be appointed liason.

> - 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.

Actually that was just a counting mistake on my behalf it was always 
meant to be nine members.
( mathematically it always has to be made up of odd number anyway to 
prevent votes ending in ties )

> - 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.

There was an attempt in the QA community back in the day where there was 
this attempt to have all testers to be required to have RHSA or RHCE 
which just laughable so needles to sayI disagree since adding an 
requirement like this will never work because obviously you have no way 
of actually verifying this in addition just because individual meets set 
requirements he still might not be up to the task so to speak or more 
likely to be so + adding a requirement like this for participation will 
drive away potential contributors.
  ( those contributors might make up them not meeting the said 
requirements by pure enthusiasm and the more experience would just help 
guide that energy into the right places )

> - 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.

Actually after going through an PDR  I actually come more to the 
conclusion that this is more an requirement that we should have and if 
we do not we should either exercise this clause in my proposal "If there 
are no candidates available, the existing remaining members of the 
Server WG will fill the seat by selecting a candidate and approving by 
majority consensus." and pump the number of server community members to 
11 or 13 ( we are going to need all those people anyway. )

Now having said that after going through an PDR, an PDR cannot be 
applied to the server WG since in fact it is the documentation which 
will be describing the transition process from an server application 
that we ship to an "product" so as I see it the initial server WG is 
setting the framework for that as well as pushing 3 products ( to iron 
out any issue in that process ) through the transition process and 
through that framework.

Ones that has been achieve the role of the server WG will be more 
selecting which application to choose next and push it through that process.


> 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.

There should be just one election and that's for the server group that 
will replaces the initial *chosen* WG after that there should not be any 
other elections that's a burden we do not want in a process like this so 
we either do as my proposal indicates which is to have each composition 
group being responsabile for chosing their member to appoint to their 
respective seat by or the individual stepping down selects another 
individual to take his place or better yet the remaining members of the 
WG choose an individual to take that seat.

Well that concludes my thoughts and comments  ;)

JBG


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