The "Membership" section of the governance charter draft

[Máirín Duffy]

On 10/30/2013 06:05 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> 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.

Oh okay, I was unaware of this, thanks for pointing it out. Is there any
place where I can read more about this so I have more of the background?

> 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 )

Okay, makes sense. I wasn't sure if the intention was to be 9 or 10.

> 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.

Your draft says, "the remaining two members coming from the Server
Community itself" so my suggested requirement of system administration
or enterprise OS experience is an attempt to qualify whether or not one
comes from the 'server community.' If you think that specific
illustration of what coming from the server community mean isn't good,
can you maybe provide what you were specifically thinking of when you
mentioned 'server community,' in your draft? Who were you thinking of /
how would you define such a person?

To be fair, I don't think requiring either system administrator
experience or experience working on an enterprise OS is so rigorous a
requirement as a Red Hat certification. I also don't think we have to
verify it; it's unlikely some unknown person from left field who we
aren't already friends with / familiar with from around Fedora is going
to show up, right? But certainly, I think it would help to have people
who have this experience make up the majority (5) of the group because
don't you need to understand about how servers are used to understand
how to develop a successful server product? My training / background /
experience as a UX designer at least has always pointed towards
understanding your user's needs as most important to developing a good
product.

How do you think the requirement would drive away potential
contributors? How many of the self-nominated folks who showed interest
in joining the group would qualify? Most if not all of us in the group
would qualify. Do you think the risk of driving away folks is greater
than the value of having this experience on the team is?

>  ( 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 )

Couldn't they take one of the four seats that doesn't require the
background?

> Actually after going through an PDR 

Which one?

> 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. )

I'm worried that having more people in the group would make it
unnecessarily challenging to manage and come to consensus on things -
even to come up with a time slot that everyone could make on a regular
basis. May I ask how, specifically, do you envision having that many
extra people being helpful - what would they do? What would they bring
to the group that it would lack otherwise being 9 people?

> 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.
> 

I don't follow; can you explain a little bit more what you mean here? I
don't think the server working group is pushing 3 products; isn't the
server one of three products? (The three being server, cloud,
workstation?) Or am I missing a reference here?

> 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.

In your opinion, is the current composition of the working group is
temporary and just to set up the framework, then there should be a
one-time election to elect the real working group? After which point
there will be no elections but each member would step down at their
leisure and choose their replacement with the rest of the group's approval?

~m