On Thu, 6 May 2010, Bill Nottingham wrote: > (This didn't quite make it into the IRC meeting today, so sending here...) > > I don't want to start a re-hash of the devel@ thread, but for those board > members who chose not to stand for re-election... why? > I debated whether or not to ignore this but if people want to know, in the interest of openness and transparency here goes. I joined the board on the platform that I wanted to bring focus to the project. I felt and still feel that our lack of a unified vision has caused anyone and everyone to join the project. Now that they're here and have conflicting views on what Fedora should be, we're seeing lots more in-fighting because of it. In pushing for this unified vision I think I've accomplished just the opposite. The more we as a project thought about the whole "what is fedora" "Who is it for", the more divisive a subject it became. Everyone thought their version of Fedora was the right one. We went in the opposing direction of unity. We've seen the project continue to grow but scale poorly. Our packagers used to be able to do anything they wanted, now have to follow a process. People don't like being told what to do, regardless of if its better for the whole or not. Our processes have gotten more complex and difficult to follow, especially for causal packagers while some needed processes still don't exist. During this time I also discovered that, in general, Fedora's install base seems to be shrinking. F12's numbers - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics show a 2% loss. While that in itself isn't great, considering the current market share growth of the Linux universe that's a significant loss. More and more polls have confirmed my fears. We're going to see even more loss when RHEL6 comes out and I've struggled personally with what this means. I've enjoyed working with the board members but it ate at my soul. To the point where I thought about leaving not just the board but the project as a whole. The board deals with highly complex and high level issues but has no means to actually implement those changes. Several people in the project openly oppose any change at all. I've had FESCo members tell me that FESCo doesn't actually report to the board. Ideas, talking, meetings, we've tried to answer the who's and what's, but this is the same Fedora I had a problem with a year ago. No matter how many questions we answer or ideas we come up with, it's going to stay that way because it's the implementation and change part that's lacking. Those facilities just don't exist so we're stuck here. Being on the board was a major distraction from my real job of being the Infrastructure Team Lead. It also put significant strain on several relationships I have formed in Fedora over the last few years. And for what? I really don't know that any actual good has come from it. Fedora's Infrastructure is at a pretty critical juncture right now in deciding its future. The work and effort it would take for me to continue to be on the board would be a distraction from my primary role and a disservice to other team members. So I'm not re-running. Without significant changes to The Fedora Project's governance (in policy, organization, and structure) I can't imagine I'd run again. I'm not the type to beat around the bush or hide opinions. I hope my time on the board is remembered for being direct and and open, not disrespectful and reckless. -Mike _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
