On 09/11/2013 10:57 AM, Josh Boyer wrote: > The overall lack of commenting really kind of baffles me still. Now I > can't tell if it's simply apathy, "silence means agreement", or some > kind of boycott. Silence means agreement in my case. "What does the board do?" is something I wonder myself. I served on the board (half a term), all gung-ho and ready to help make positive change happen. Instead, it was a really demotivational experience for me - so much so that the negative effects still linger on in the form of an apathetic rain-cloud over my head that I never carried before wrt Fedora. (Before I had a happy pony rainbow.) It burnt me out, almost irretrievably so. Really - and I hope I'm not being horrifyingly unfair to the fellow board members I shared a term with, I don't think fault lays with anybody - it didn't seem like the board did much of anything: - Any time an actually interesting discussion came up, it had to be cut short for time and tabled ad nauseum. - IIRC a lot of the board discussion also centered around what the board should do! That is too navel-gazey for me. - There was a lot of rubber-stamping of things that were obviously fine to rubber-stamp and needed it for TM reasons or whatnot (mostly approving Fedora community domains.) - Then there was a lot of rubber-stamping of things that were going to happen irrespective of whether they received the board's rubber stamp or not, which seemed pointless to me. The board doesn't have any authority to step in and fix things when they are broken, in the case that the members are actually of the same mind as to what to do. Instead, they can politely ask people to do things, but have no authority to actually tell them to do it, kind of akin to Milton standing in a crowded conference room asking quietly if someone could please give back his red stapler. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHHZBmF8mk4 I like to get things done, and make things happen, and that is not something that I felt happened enough when I was on the board. >From the other side - and maybe this is where I developed the false impression that the board actually does things - before I became a board member, Ricky, Sijis, and I were 'commissioned' by the board to redesign Fedora's web presence. It was a three-phase project that involved the design of spins.fpo, get.fpo, fedoraproject.org, and fedoracommunity.org: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Website_redesign?rd=Website_redesign_2009 It was nice in that when we needed the board to provide us things in order to get the design done - say a target audience - we told them what we needed, and they went and made that happen and provided it to us, and we used that in the design. The whole process actually was kicked off by a single post mmcgrath made to the fedora-users list, there's a summary I wrote recently for quaid here: http://iquaid.org/2013/09/04/defining-self-identity-for-an-open-source-project-how-did-fedora-do-it/comment-page-1/#comment-7254 While slow, that seemed functional to me. So maybe I was given the impression the board was functional when it usually isn't. Or maybe the term I was on the board was a particularly bad one. Of course, that process wasn't perfect. While the board gave us a target audience for the design, for example, not all groups agreed with that particular target audience, and the design received a lot of snipes at the time from those who have a very different idea as to what the target audience should be. It's sat and basically bit-rotted in place over the past 3-4 years. I think for the time it was a nice lipstick on a pig, where the pig is the actual distro - *not* because it's ugly, but because governance its various aspects is a bit of a mess so if you dare go near it you're wresting with the zombies of those who tried and failed before you any time you try to touch it. The website is safe and landmine-free and its governance and control is pretty straightforward. Here I was going to link to a picture of Indiana Jones and the skeletons in the big temple place where he got the grail in the last crusade, but I can't find one so you've been spared. But yeah. You can't get the grail, but you can go wild landscaping the path to it all you want. Anyway maybe if board members were functional it would help, at least a little bit. E.g., if I was on the board (I don't want to be) as someone on the design team, it would be easier for me to know how to approach the design team and find folks to get things done, just the same if someone from marketing or ambassadors was on the board and those groups needed to be approached to get something done. Perhaps this change could increase the potential for getting things actually done. (Not to say that the people on the board don't do things, it's just they don't always map nicely out to the teams that do things in such a way that there is always someone representative of a group that needs to be approached) Although, to be fair, I've been involved in non-FOSS non-profit work and it seems their boards suffer from similar issues that I'm ranting about here. My excuse for this mail is that I got 5 hours of sleep last night; I'm very sorry, ~m _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
