The Fedora project governance model is pretty straight forward. Most groups have a clear purpose (e.g. FESCo is responsible for the overall technical direct) and most have an elected or volunteer community that has organized itself fairly well. This is a good thing. It shows people exactly who to talk to and how to get elected and what is expected of members of that group. The one exception to this is the Fedora Board. Before I was on the Board, I asked several times "what does the Board do?". The answer has always been "steward for the Fedora trademarks and high level project direction." It's a somewhat nebulous definition, likely purposely so. The question hasn't really gone away though. I get asked this all the time and it's, at times, hard to answer. In the beginning times, there was a lot of higher level project details to decide. What does the project take from the community, how can we grow the ability to contribute, etc. That lead to Fedora Extras, the establishment of many of the existing committees, the grand merge of Core and Extras. All good things. All essentially solved, and to be honest all questions that needed immediate answers so they were low hanging fruit. Later, in my first term on the Board, we were working on defining what is now the Target User. Clearly a higher level project decision, so something the Board should work on. Whether it has made a difference to our project is debatable, but I told myself we were at least _doing_ something. We now seem to be at a point where we're again redefining how we're targeting, what we're producing, etc. Again, I think this is great. However, I noticed a difference this time. All of the current change and direction has come from FESCo or other community members. None of it has been generated or driven by the Board. That got me thinking. The Board is assembled from people that get elected, plus some appointees made by the FPL. And to be sure, the people on the Board have always cared about the Fedora project. But the actual composition of the Board is essentially random. It's made of people that want to be on the Board because the Board exists. Sometimes this works. Other times it can be a hindrance if the Board doesn't have the expertise to handle a topic it is presented. So. What if we could do better? What if we could make the Board more representative of Fedora contributors from a composition standpoint? We have all these other committees and groups already doing the day-to-day stewardship of the project. We have the Fedora Project Lead, basically, leading. Maybe we can combine them. Cutting to the chase, what if the Board was comprised of a representative from each of: FESCo, Docs, Rel-Eng, QA, Ambassadors, Infrastructure, Design, Marketing, and <open>. Each of those committees, which clearly have a large stake and vested interest in Fedora succeeding, would chose one member to appoint to their respective Board seat. That person would be responsible for their group's interaction with the Board and the other groups. Some of you might notice the composition proposed is essentially that of the Release Readiness meetings. This isn't by coincidence. Call it DevOps or whatever other trendy thing you want, but getting the stakeholders of something together to discuss the betterment of that thing just kind of makes sense to me. It also shares ideas with the Fedora Council idea, which is by coincidence because I discovered that after I had thought about most of this. Still good to see commonality. The <open> seat could be anything. I don't have a clear group that should fill it. Maybe it can be appointed to gain valuable insight in specific areas (though we can always just ask for that insight anyway). Maybe it could be a representative from the new Product Workgroups that are being formed. The really astute of you might notice that with a few exceptions, the _people_ on the Board might not even change that much. That's FINE! The proposal isn't about people, it's about the composition of the Board. It is interesting to note that under my own proposal I would no longer be on the Board. I'm OK with that if it makes the project better positioned going forward. I'm curious as to what people think. I'm putting this out there as a discussion starter. Hopefully the discussion it generates is positive and thought provoking. josh _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
