On Fri, 13 Aug 2010, Jon Stanley wrote: > - Importantly, the appointed seats can be used to balance the > viewpoints of the Board. You'll notice this most prominently in the > second appointment per election cycle, which occurs after voting has > taken place. > > - It gives community leaders who may not be as well known an > opportunity to participate. Truthfully, I'm not sure that enough > community members *know* me to get elected to the Board. This is > generally a function of my role as a volunteer - I'm pretty well known > in the areas that I contribute in, but not across a broad > cross-section of the project (this is my opinion, people are free to > tell me I'm full of it :) ). Back when I was responsible for filling the appointed seats, I saw it in a similar way: (1) A check that can help make sure that the board is "balanced", though the manner in which different people define that term could be its own thread. (2) An opportunity to be a bit strategic, which history has shown may or may not work out. Red Hat acquired JBoss during my tenure as FPL and I thought it would be a good idea to appoint someone from JBoss who worked on community issues to the board. Several people who had leadership roles within Red Hat engineering (but who were not Fedora-first in their job description) were offered an opportunity to be appointed to the Board, as an attempt to build some different and less-obvious connections between Fedora's leadership and Red Hat's engineers. This doesn't apply only to Red Hatters, either. There's also an opportunity to say (for any person in the world) "The FPL thinks this person's voice would be valuable on the Board, and the FPL wants to guarantee that it can happen." (3) An opportunity to give people a chance to be directly accountable for the overall Fedora Project, which is a combination of strategic discussions, a lot of mediation and compromise, and a chance to participate in Fedora differently than what their "standard" volunteer experience had been to that point. --Max _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
