Re: The Inquirier on F17
- Original Message - - Paul W. Frields sticks...@gmail.com wrote: Since the FPL has appointed three of those seats to volunteers and only one to someone who's a Red Hat employee, I'm not sure how this is relevant. Looking at the Board history for those seats[1] one can see half the appointments since mid-2008 have been volunteers. Also of note is the fact that half the people elected by the community since that time have also been volunteers. So the appointments don't look slanted toward Red Hat employees AFAICT, which is just as intended. We can agree to disagree on your overall point, that's fine. I just wanted to point out the facts don't support an effort to stack the Board with Red Hat people. * * * [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/History How about the bigger question, what percentage of FESCo has been Red Hat employees during any term. How many ran for elections and got voted... After all it is FESCo that really matters what is in Fedora, not the board. More than to other Fedora bodies as FESCo is engineering committee and Red Hatters in Fedora are mostly engineers. Makes sense :) You see less in Board and even less in FAmSCo... Jaroslav I would track this out myself but the use of non@redhat email addresses makes it hard, even asking the candidates in Election town halls you get the run around commonly. Who I work for doesn't matter. How many times have we heard that? -- Bob -- marketing mailing list marketing@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing -- marketing mailing list marketing@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
Re: The Inquirier on F17
On Fri, Jun 01, 2012 at 01:06:28PM -0500, inode0 wrote: On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: Let me try to rephrase this so you better understand what I'm getting at... Why does Red Hat reserve four seats on the board for itself to appoint to whomever it chooses? Red Hat used to reserve five and released one to the elected pool when Paul was the FPL iirc. Right, that was something I changed during my FPL time. I have in the fairly recent past asked for consideration of shifting two additional appointed seats to the elected pool and/or considering the appointment process to either be done by the Board or a combination of the Board and the FPL. Generally the appointment process has been done with the involvement of the Board anyway as I understand it. I don't think very much would change either way in the end. Very often two of the appointments have been candidates who missed being elected by one spot. But regardless of who makes the final appointment decision people will like it when they like it and disapprove when they don't. Making either of the changes above might move the blame assigned to the community though which would be a benefit to Red Hat. The FPL individually is accountable for making appointments. One of the reasons we have appointments, in my opinion, is to make sure the FPL has the authority and opportunity to reach outside a usual suspects group to identify and include leaders that might not otherwise be elected. I feel the FPL should use appointments to bring different perspectives to the Board, and/or include people with useful experience that helps the Fedora Project reach specific goals over the coming year. I can't speak for Robyn, obviously, but I see Garrett Holmstrom as a possible recent example. His experience in the cloud area will undoubtedly help inform larger project work that keeps Fedora relevant in a cloud-centric environment. Since I can speak for myself, I would use Dimitris Glezos (of Indifex) as an example, bringing an international perspective, as well as I18n/L10n experience, to a Board that I felt was very North American-centric. What gives Red Hat the right to do so against the community? I don't think it is against the community. There are arguably good reasons for appointed seats, one example being to keep some balance in the Board's experience and skills that could be lacking if all seats were elected. For those who agree a partially elected and partially appointed Board is a good thing then it is just a question of how best to arrange the details. I imagine in the beginning it was easiest to get started by giving the appointments to the FPL and it has worked well enough that only a minor change was made a few years ago. This is a good explanation. I'd also reiterate that against the community is not supported by the fact that (1) the Fedora community has chosen to elect quite a few Red Hat employees, and (2) the FPL continues to appoint quite a few non-Red Hat employees, over the Board's history. When I was the FPL, having appointments afforded me flexibility in finding people I thought lent the Board extra credibility and insight -- but I always took care that these appointed people supported the Project's mission and values, thus making them with the community, not against it. I think other FPLs have all done the same and I've never had a quibble with an appointment. I try to remember meritocracy and democracy are not identical. Like many people who've been in a leadership position in a meritocratic community (as Fedora strives to be), I struggle with the idea that elections run the risk of becoming popularity contests. This doesn't mean appointments should be used to install unpopular people; rather, they support meritocracy by expanding the experience and capability of the Board in line with the project's mission and values. -- Paul W. Frieldshttp://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ The open source story continues to grow: http://opensource.com -- marketing mailing list marketing@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
Re: The Inquirier on F17
On 06/04/2012 02:51 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote: This is a good explanation. I'd also reiterate that against the community is not supported by the fact that (1), and (2) the FPL continues to appoint quite a few non-Red Hat employees, over the Board's history. Well the FPL is not elected by the community but is hired by Red Hat through some internal process they have that we ( the community ) know nothing about and Red Hat has a track record of inventing position within the community then more often then not hire people outside the community to fill those positions. ( Even thou the company has been getting better at rephrasing these job positions and choosing people within the community rather than outside in more recent times). Arguably an better approach to choose an FPL is for the community to nominate individuals which then would be subjected to whatever process Red Hat uses internally to filter out and eventually get on it's payroll. At least to me that's the only compromising solution that I can see working between both parties involved without one ruling over the other. With regards to the Fedora community has chosen to elect quite a few Red Hat employees which I can certainly agree to since I my self have voted Red Hat employees over community candidates since I base my voting more on the individual work and technical knowledge rather than on some popularity contest. But I still think that this is one thing that is wrong with our election process as in I feel that corporate entity's or individual from there in may not be allowed to hold majority of seats neither on the board nor in any of the committees within the community to prevent that corporates interest influence either directly or indirectly the projects direction and resources and that view of mine is not limited to Red Hat but to all sponsor, sponsoring the project ( if and then when Red Hat *decides* some other corporate can sponsor the project). And here are few I think is wrong with election process and is needed to ensure fairness through out the community 1. The same election process should be used through out the whole project so famsco/fesco should follow the same process as do everyone else. 2. Individual may not serve on more then one committee at a time. 3. There needs to be a limit on how many release cycles or terms individuals may serve on the board/committees to ensure rotation and enough fresh ideas/approaches to any given task at hand. 4. Nominees cant change their Introduction once the nomination period has ended. 5. Nominees that seek re-elections should clearly state what work they did when serving their last election period. JBG -- marketing mailing list marketing@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
Re: The Inquirier on F17
On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 12:53 PM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: On 06/04/2012 02:51 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote: This is a good explanation. I'd also reiterate that against the community is not supported by the fact that (1), and (2) the FPL continues to appoint quite a few non-Red Hat employees, over the Board's history. Well the FPL is not elected by the community but is hired by Red Hat through some internal process they have that we ( the community ) know nothing about and Red Hat has a track record of inventing position within the community then more often then not hire people outside the community to fill those positions. ( Even thou the company has been getting better at rephrasing these job positions and choosing people within the community rather than outside in more recent times). Arguably an better approach to choose an FPL is for the community to nominate individuals which then would be subjected to whatever process Red Hat uses internally to filter out and eventually get on it's payroll. Arguably that is a worse approach too. At least to me that's the only compromising solution that I can see working between both parties involved without one ruling over the other. I think you give the FPL more power than the position really has now. While the position has great responsibilities both to the Fedora community and to Red Hat, aside from the unused veto power over Board decisions the FPL's power comes from doing good work and persuading others by argument and more often by example that something is valuable. Without community buy-in I don't see much power there. With regards to the Fedora community has chosen to elect quite a few Red Hat employees which I can certainly agree to since I my self have voted Red Hat employees over community candidates since I base my voting more on the individual work and technical knowledge rather than on some popularity contest. But I still think that this is one thing that is wrong with our election process as in I feel that corporate entity's or individual from there in may not be allowed to hold majority of seats neither on the board nor in any of the committees within the community to prevent that corporates interest influence either directly or indirectly the projects direction and resources and that view of mine is not limited to Red Hat but to all sponsor, sponsoring the project ( if and then when Red Hat *decides* some other corporate can sponsor the project). Don't you think the power to influence the project's direction is coming from the work being done more than from participation on a governance body? And here are few I think is wrong with election process and is needed to ensure fairness through out the community 1. The same election process should be used through out the whole project so famsco/fesco should follow the same process as do everyone else. I'm not sure what you mean here. The process is almost identical for FAmSCo and FESCo with minor details that differ like FAmSCo does not require members to be in the packager group. :) I am interested in understanding what you mean though as I am also very interested in an election process that the community believes in. So please tell us in more detail where you think the problem lies now in this case. 2. Individual may not serve on more then one committee at a time. This one I have pretty strong sympathy for since in general I think participating in multiple governance bodies tends to have more negative consequences than positive. But there are always exceptions and off the top of my head today the only person falling into this category now is a volunteer community member elected to two of them. And as far as I can tell he is doing a fine job on both. 3. There needs to be a limit on how many release cycles or terms individuals may serve on the board/committees to ensure rotation and enough fresh ideas/approaches to any given task at hand. I have some sympathy for this too. Getting new ideas into the governance/steering discussion is a positive thing from my perspective. Each governance body can choose now to create such limits, has discussed them in the past, and seems to have always rejected them. I think the usual arguments against imposing limits are (1) voters can enforce any limits they choose by their actions voting and (2) there have been periods where even getting enough people to run to hold an election has been challenging without telling others they can't run. I'll point out that this is one place where the history of the FPL might help inform the governance bodies of the value of new ideas and fresh enthusiasm. 4. Nominees cant change their Introduction once the nomination period has ended. This is something we could just do. I'm not sure I see very much value in doing it though. 5. Nominees that seek re-elections should clearly state what work they did when serving their last election period. Did you
Re: The Inquirier on F17
First thing I'd like to say - I'm pretty sure this is not a right mailing list to discuss governance issues - there's Board Advisory one. Sparsely used by community :( - Original Message - On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 12:53 PM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson And here are few I think is wrong with election process and is needed to ensure fairness through out the community 1. The same election process should be used through out the whole project so famsco/fesco should follow the same process as do everyone else. I'm not sure what you mean here. The process is almost identical for FAmSCo and FESCo with minor details that differ like FAmSCo does not require members to be in the packager group. :) I don't understand it neither :) I am interested in understanding what you mean though as I am also very interested in an election process that the community believes in. So please tell us in more detail where you think the problem lies now in this case. 2. Individual may not serve on more then one committee at a time. This one I have pretty strong sympathy for since in general I think participating in multiple governance bodies tends to have more negative consequences than positive. But there are always exceptions and off the top of my head today the only person falling into this category now is a volunteer community member elected to two of them. And as far as I can tell he is doing a fine job on both. People having such important seat should be fully dedicated to this position. And for me it's not a problem to be involved in engineering and for example ambassadors work, just you have to be sure to make it. (and not only make it but do it). 3. There needs to be a limit on how many release cycles or terms individuals may serve on the board/committees to ensure rotation and enough fresh ideas/approaches to any given task at hand. I have some sympathy for this too. Getting new ideas into the governance/steering discussion is a positive thing from my perspective. Each governance body can choose now to create such limits, has discussed them in the past, and seems to have always rejected them. I think the usual arguments against imposing limits are (1) voters can enforce any limits they choose by their actions voting and (2) there have been periods where even getting enough people to run to hold an election has been challenging without telling others they can't run. The new blood is always welcomed and I'm trying to attract more people for every elections! So again - strong limits are not something I'd like to see and it does not mean, we will get a new interested contributors. This is more task for our marketing us to sell people why they should participate (one of my goals, I should implement it on global level ;-). I'll point out that this is one place where the history of the FPL might help inform the governance bodies of the value of new ideas and fresh enthusiasm. 4. Nominees cant change their Introduction once the nomination period has ended. This is something we could just do. I'm not sure I see very much value in doing it though. 5. Nominees that seek re-elections should clearly state what work they did when serving their last election period. Did you ask them to do that on the questionnaire or at a townhall? We can ask the candidates whatever we want to ask them, someone just has to take a few minutes and ask the question. Board members now have goals, again, we have to attract community to be more involved and interested in Board member goal's achievements. For now, we left scheduled reports and let Board member to show the important milestones of the goals when they are ready. Any idea? But - Advisory Board ;-) R. John -- marketing mailing list marketing@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing -- marketing mailing list marketing@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
Re: The Inquirier on F17
On 06/04/2012 07:03 PM, inode0 wrote: On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 12:53 PM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson johan...@gmail.com wrote: On 06/04/2012 02:51 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote: This is a good explanation. I'd also reiterate that against the community is not supported by the fact that (1), and (2) the FPL continues to appoint quite a few non-Red Hat employees, over the Board's history. Well the FPL is not elected by the community but is hired by Red Hat through some internal process they have that we ( the community ) know nothing about and Red Hat has a track record of inventing position within the community then more often then not hire people outside the community to fill those positions. ( Even thou the company has been getting better at rephrasing these job positions and choosing people within the community rather than outside in more recent times). Arguably an better approach to choose an FPL is for the community to nominate individuals which then would be subjected to whatever process Red Hat uses internally to filter out and eventually get on it's payroll. Arguably that is a worse approach too. What are the downside you see to this approach? At least to me that's the only compromising solution that I can see working between both parties involved without one ruling over the other. I think you give the FPL more power than the position really has now. While the position has great responsibilities both to the Fedora community and to Red Hat, aside from the unused veto power over Board decisions the FPL's power comes from doing good work and persuading others by argument and more often by example that something is valuable. Without community buy-in I don't see much power there. This is about transparency, community's participation and independence in the process in choosing our own leader instead of having it chosen *for* us. With regards to the Fedora community has chosen to elect quite a few Red Hat employees which I can certainly agree to since I my self have voted Red Hat employees over community candidates since I base my voting more on the individual work and technical knowledge rather than on some popularity contest. But I still think that this is one thing that is wrong with our election process as in I feel that corporate entity's or individual from there in may not be allowed to hold majority of seats neither on the board nor in any of the committees within the community to prevent that corporates interest influence either directly or indirectly the projects direction and resources and that view of mine is not limited to Red Hat but to all sponsor, sponsoring the project ( if and then when Red Hat *decides* some other corporate can sponsor the project). Don't you think the power to influence the project's direction is coming from the work being done more than from participation on a governance body? Not with regards to FESCO no I cant say I can. More often than not decisions that have been made there appear to me being more beneficial to RHEL than it actually does the project even more so do the action of FPC. And here are few I think is wrong with election process and is needed to ensure fairness through out the community 1. The same election process should be used through out the whole project so famsco/fesco should follow the same process as do everyone else. I'm not sure what you mean here. The process is almost identical for FAmSCo and FESCo with minor details that differ like FAmSCo does not require members to be in the packager group. :) I am interested in understanding what you mean though as I am also very interested in an election process that the community believes in. So please tell us in more detail where you think the problem lies now in this case. Look at fairly reason events in FamSCO... 2. Individual may not serve on more then one committee at a time. This one I have pretty strong sympathy for since in general I think participating in multiple governance bodies tends to have more negative consequences than positive. But there are always exceptions and off the top of my head today the only person falling into this category now is a volunteer community member elected to two of them. And as far as I can tell he is doing a fine job on both. I'm not that entirely convinced that Christoph being on the both sides of the table in recent FamSCo event was a positive thing. 3. There needs to be a limit on how many release cycles or terms individuals may serve on the board/committees to ensure rotation and enough fresh ideas/approaches to any given task at hand. I have some sympathy for this too. Getting new ideas into the governance/steering discussion is a positive thing from my perspective. Each governance body can choose now to create such limits, has discussed them in the past, and seems to have always rejected them. I think the usual arguments against imposing limits are (1) voters can enforce any limits they choose by their actions voting and
Re: The Inquirier on F17
On 06/05/2012 12:04 AM, inode0 wrote: snip.../snip Don't you think the power to influence the project's direction is coming from the work being done more than from participation on a governance body? Not with regards to FESCO no I cant say I can. More often than not decisions that have been made there appear to me being more beneficial to RHEL than it actually does the project even more so do the action of FPC. Well, I have no objection with things being beneficial to RHEL. I would argue that Fedora providing technology desired by RHEL and other downstream consumers is as important for Fedora as anything else we do that is motivated by a target audience. Here we come to a point of one of what I consider a core issue in the community which is this so called target audience and the set of Default that goes with it. From my point of view the board should not decided what is that so called target audience or is the so called Default we ship but rather we should allow each sub community to define it's own set of target audience ( which afaik they do btw ), we drop the so called default to give all sub communities and various components an equal foot to stand on and equal presentation on our web site etc. and resources within the project ( which currently is not the case ) because the community is filled with components that provide same or similar function. Arguably having the Default has been historically and will continue to be the cause for the most confrontation within the project heck if I put on my QA hat every release cycle we are faced with the question if we should only test Gnome or if we should test Gnome and KDE ( due to historic reasons it has been allowed to tag along ) or should we test Gnome, KDE, XFCE,LXDE which we try to do to the best of our ability since in essence we are an service in the project as is releng and design community's as well but we are kinda being told to only test the so called Default which btw no criteria exist for which leads to the fact that none of the other *DE sub community's can strive to become that Default to get the same treatment as we are giving the current set of defaults ( see what I'm getting at with this)... snip.. /snip I'm not that entirely convinced that Christoph being on the both sides of the table in recent FamSCo event was a positive thing. Both sides of what table? The Board had nothing to do with the reorganization of FAmSCo as far as I know. Well, aside from ignoring the call to disband FAmSCo. :) Serving both sides of the tables is always a bad thing from my pov. Arguably the process should be this. You can run for any open position within the project if you aren't already serving one If you should get elected in more than one you will have to choose which one you will serve and the next runner up will take the seat you give up. 3. There needs to be a limit on how many release cycles or terms individuals may serve on the board/committees to ensure rotation and enough fresh ideas/approaches to any given task at hand. I have some sympathy for this too. Getting new ideas into the governance/steering discussion is a positive thing from my perspective. Each governance body can choose now to create such limits, has discussed them in the past, and seems to have always rejected them. I think the usual arguments against imposing limits are (1) voters can enforce any limits they choose by their actions voting and Not when there is a whole corporation voting for their *coworkers* in the elections which they either do so because of their own free will or because their manager might have put them up to it. Please. So few people vote if you could just get 100 people to vote for candidate X that candidate would win. Hardly anyone from Red Hat votes, hardly anyone from the community votes. At least regardless of what that corporate is it should never be allowed to hold majority of seats in any governing body within the community from my pov ( Unless ofcourse these seats are being filled in by the FPL because of lack of nominees ) snip.../snip There already exist an rule to deal with that should that be the case which just needs to be extended to all governing body's within the project. Yes, and in the case of the Board the rule is that the FPL appoints all the seats that the community failed to field candidates for - bet you don't like that rule. Nope I actually agree with that rule very much and the FPL should appoints whomever it feels like even fill all the seats with Red Hat employees for all I care including people serving other governing positions within the project. In the other cases the elections are delayed hoping more candidates will show up. Neither of these is a good thing. It makes no sense delaying it. I'll point out that this is one place where the history of the FPL might help inform the governance bodies of the value of new ideas and fresh enthusiasm. 4.
