On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 07:09:47AM -0700, John Poelstra wrote: >> Toshio Kuratomi said the following on 08/13/2010 01:48 PM Pacific Time: >> > Notes: >> > * In the Max Spevack era, the Board was pushed away from making decisions >> > for two reasons: 1) FESCo was deemed to be the body that understood the >> > technical issues at hand and therefore the body that should make most of >> > the decisions regarding Fedora. 2) The Board was not all elected and >> > therefore didn't have as much of a "mandate from the people". In the Paul >> > Frields era, the Board started to make many more decisions. I don't think >> > that's necessarily a good thing as they've trampled all over reason #1 >> > above but being fully elected would help to alleviate reason #2. >> >> I don't recall things going down this way. Please name some concrete >> examples of this "trampling" so we can be discussing the same thing. >> > The first example of it that I can think of was at the transition between > the Max Spevack and Paul Frields eras with Codeina. Here's some pointers > from the middle to mid-end of that: > > http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2008-March/005032.html > http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2008-March/005054.html > > Since then, there's been the pieces of the Board vision that have been about > technical aspects and implementation. For instance, the Target Audience > discussion and outcome: > http://lwn.net/Articles/358865/ > > (btw, I was unable to find this written up on the wiki -- stickster, is that > on purpose or is it there somewhere that I can't find it?) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_base is probably what you are looking for. > > And the whole updates vision piece: > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Stable_release_updates_vision > > What's the common thread in these? Here's my subjective "History of Fedora > Governance". I feel that at the start of Fedora, there was a cabal of > engineers working on getting things done so that we could have > a distribution. This became formalized into FESCo which we see now. In > these early days we also had Fedora Project Leaders with gradually > increasing power. They did work coordinating resources within Red Hat, > selling Fedora to influential people within Red Hat, helping to mediate > disputes within the community, branched into media relations, and gradually > took on the role of managing and representing the Project as a whole. In > order to keep power from becoming too concentrated, the Fedora Project Board > was formed which took on some of these duties for the FPL. > > These examples all have the Fedora Project Board crossing over from > restricting itself to decisions about the Project as a whole into making > decisions about the Fedora Distribution. > > But that's perhaps inevitable. George Orwell put it impolitely as "All > power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely". Perhaps a way of > phrasing this without the negative connotation of corruption is: "Power > tends to grow into a vaccuum". To me, it seems that FESCo has been giving > up a lot of its duties, responsibilities, and powers and the Board has been > absorbing them. > > One way to deal with this is to give those powers back to FESCo. > > Another way would be to merge FESCo and the Board. > > Not sure which of those is best at the moment. > > -Toshio > > _______________________________________________ > advisory-board mailing list > advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board > _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
