Wow, it got kind of quiet in here. Sorry for the delay — between F21 Alpha and the bash vulnerability, it's been a busy week. But let's get back to the big issue! I can see a large open map of possible ways to go forward, but here's my suggestion for what I think is best. I've tried to take into account the concerns noted in the previous board ticket¹. Let me know if there are big areas that seem to be missing and we'll work those out. I know we need an official document on consensus process and how exactly that will work; that's a next step. Like everything we do, it's okay if we don't get all of the details right at first; we can always refine. As we've discussed, it's really hard to represent the entire sprawl of the project on a board with a limited number of seats. In addition to the representative seats we've talked about, I want to have two to four members each actively connected to an 18-month goal; for example: - Fedora.next products (Marketing + WGs + QA + Metrics) - Fedora.next rings (Base WG + Env & Stacks + RelEng) - Automate all the things (QA + RelEng + Infrastructure) - Improved project communication (CWG + Design + Hyperkitty) These are example goals (although not completely arbitrary). Here, the person selected would be actively driving and coordinating each thing. The parenthetical groups are non-exclusive examples of areas of the project each "objective lead" would work with. These would be relatively high-load roles — this is where we really get into reducing stress on the FPL. In most cases, it shouldn't be hard to find someone, as these should generally represent big ongoing effort in the project anyway. Sometimes, though, there may be something which we all agree is a good idea but no one has made their focus — as Eric was saying, if we only draw people from things we're already doing, it's hard to do new things. In any case, these would be focused on specific goals, and once each goal is met, changed for a new position reflecting a new community goal. They would be more than just advisory members, but their votes would only be binding in areas related to their objectives. Then, we want to have representative seats, as we've been discussing. I propose four: - Engineering (representing FESCo, QA, RelEng, Infrastructure, WGs, FPC, etc.) - Outreach (representing FAmSCo, regions, Marketing, etc.) - Elected (at large) - Elected (at large) The engineering and outreach members would be selected by the people active in those areas (probably FESCo and FAmSCo, as the existing steering committees for each). One seat covers a very broad area, because that's the only way to keep the numbers small. The responsibility would be to represent those groups collectively, _not_ to be an individual voice that happens to be voted-in by some subset of Fedora. Representatives of more specific groups would be encouraged to participate in discussion, but only these positions would have a final binding vote. (We could formalize these as "auxiliary members" as Christoph suggests; my preference is to keep it informal.) The elected positions cover Fedora's subprojects not under the engineering or outreach banners (docs, l10n, etc.), and the community at large. I don't see a better way of representing the groups that don't fall neatly under "building the distro" and "building the userbase" while keeping the number of seats to a level which feels functional. Finally, we would keep a few formalized appointed positions. Overall, this can be thought of as just reframing the currently-appointed board positions as connected to specific named roles: - Fedora Program Manager (FPgM) - Community Action and Impact - Diversity Advisor - Fedora Project Leader The FPgM is something that we actually have already, and which we actually depend on a lot for getting releases out the door, so I agree with Jaroslav (the current FPgM) that it would be nice to formalize that role within Fedora itself. Community Action & Impact is a new one — Red Hat's Open Source and Standards group is interested in funding a new full-time position to lead initiatives to grow the Fedora user and developer communities, and to make Red Hat / Fedora interactions even more transparent and positive. The Fedora community budget comes to us through OSAS, and this position will facilitate decision-making on how to best focus that to meet our collective objectives. The diversity advisor role also doesn't currently exist, but it's an area where we have a lot of work to do, so I would like to see it exist. (And I think it's much bigger than an 18-month objective.) And the FPL... that's me. I'd still like to stay involved. :) Overall, we wouldn't be meeting-driven, although we would probably have semi-regular meetings in order to discuss what's going on and to clear through anything outstanding which can be quickly resolved. We might make the regular Monday meeting into "office hours", instead. All members would be expected to regularly communicate what's going on in their area, through blog posts or other public updates. We'd use the lazy consensus model extensively, with strong expectations for communicating about decisions or plans that might affect others. ---- 1. https://fedorahosted.org/board/ticket/9 -- Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ board-discuss mailing list board-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/board-discuss
