Server WG Governance

[inode0]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 2:08 PM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
> At the risk of starting two out-of-control threads in one day, I
> wanted to bring up a discussion I had with Karsten Wade last week at
> Red Hat Summit. We were discussing various governance methodologies,
> specifically that of FESCo, the Board, the WGs and CentOS.
>
> There are some very interesting ideas that the CentOS Board has put
> into place, the most relevant I think is their mechanism for
> consensus-based decision-making[1]. I'd like to describe it a little
> bit here and note how I think in many ways this is pretty much how we
> in the Server WG have actually been operating thus far and that we may
> want to actually formalize it.

I think some variation of consensus decision making would be a very
nice fit. While I am a pretty big fan of the process in general I'm
normally not so fond of using a unaminous voting rule but that is a
detail you can think about. Other groups do use other less absolute
voting rules, like unanimous - 1, which allows for a small bit of
dissent without derailing the decision.

The one abstract concern I have about consensus decision making is
that it might tend to water down the difficult decisions that really
need to be made at times leaving the governed body with either the
status quo or something quite different from what was proposed to
begin with.

I'll be watching with great interest as I too have considered
proposing something based on consensus decision making for one of the
other governance bodies in Fedora.

John