On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 9:24 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 08:55 -0700, Luis Villa wrote: >> On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 5:52 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> > During the discussion following the Board election, the subject of term >> > limits was raised. Generally those who commented on term limits thought >> > they were a good idea, including several Board members. I've written up >> > a proposal to amend the Board's succession plan with term limits, in the >> > hopes that these limits would encourage continual but gentle change in >> > the Board's elected membership over time. >> > >> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pfrields/Proposal_for_Board_Term_Limits >> > >> > Comments appreciated either here or in the discussion page for the >> > proposal on the wiki. I'll bring this before the Board for final >> > discussion and a vote at our August 5th session, which will likely be a >> > public IRC meeting. >> >> This may well reflect my position as an entrenched incumbent ;) but a >> little more explanation of what problem this solves would be good. >> Incumbents may have a lot of valuable institutional memory, so making >> them step away on a schedule might not be ideal. If you're concerned >> about people overstaying their welcome and getting new blood on board, >> it might be better to focus on how to get new blood involved and >> increase the new blood's profile, and how to measure involvement of >> incumbents (possibly privately) so that they get the message that they >> are fading and ought to formalize that by fading out completely. >> >> You mention Notting's wisdom in this sense, which reminds me that >> getting rid of institutional knowledge is particularly problematic >> given the elected/appointed split- if this actually applies only to >> elected members, you're automatically putting the elected members at >> an institutional memory disadvantage relative to the appointed >> members. > > The problem at hand was the perceived dominance by full-time Fedora > people on the Board. People who spend their entire $DAYJOB as well as > their spare time on Fedora are automatically very involved and visible. > That can translate directly to votes on the basis of name recognition, > which really disadvantages people who are very involved, but in a > somewhat more limited fashion because they don't have the luxury of > doing Fedora all day every day. (Maybe a similar advantage would go to > someone unemployed, but let's not argue that for right now.) ;-) It seems to me that a term limit would just get a different set of full-timers on the board. If full-timers are the problem (and I agree that they might be) you might consider instead a cap on the number of people who work on fedora full time. The GNOME Board does something similar (no more than 40% of seats be held by any one company) and it seems to work pretty well for us. > Having said that, I like your thinking about making sure that incumbents > are involved. I've been very much a proponent of getting people on the > Board to pick up action items and push them to completion. Again, that > should be independent of $DAYJOB -- people who are volunteer Board > members are equally expected to carry some of this load by dint of their > elected position. > > I'm not sure how to measure that directly other than through tracking of > our agenda, maintaining a clear list of action items and the accountable > parties for them, and setting deadlines for their completion. Those > lists are provided to the community through this mailing list and > elsewhere, so any contributor should feel free to hold members' feet to > the fire as needed. I do believe that people who don't have the time or > energy to see self-assignments through will generally gravitate away > from the re-election process. We've been experimenting with using Tracks to track board tasks; I'm not sure it is ideal, but something to think about. Just publishing meeting attendance records before each election would have been helpful for us in the past as well. Luis _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
