FESCo election nominations now open

Andreas Thienemann andreas at bawue.net
Thu May 21 21:23:33 UTC 2009


On Thu, 21 May 2009, inode0 wrote:

> I would just as likely think the voting pool should be constricted to
> be aligned with the candidate pool. Without thoughtful deliberation
> and some understanding of the reasoning behind its current structure
> it just seems rather arbitrary to me. And I'm sure there was plenty of
> thoughtful deliberation at the time, but I'm unaware of what it was.

I was actually starting to write what a terrible idea this would be, as 
we'd be taking a step back from being a truly open project...

But then it occured to me, that we've never really been an open project. 
There's no way to vote for a feature which will then be implemented as a 
simple example. If you want a feature, implement it or persuade someone 
that it is important enough for him to write the necessary code.

Fedora has always been (more or less) a meritocracy. Whoever does the 
work, has the power to define the direction fedora is taking.
>From what I gather, everybody is happy with this approach.
 

Allowing everybody with cla_done plus one additional group to vote for the 
Fedora steering organizations is actually going against the meritocracy. 
Fedora ismostly a collection of software packages. Therefore it is 
consistent with the idea of a meritocracy to restrict the candidate pool 
for the steering committee to the people working on the software, that is 
everyone with cvs access.
Limiting the group of people eligble to cast votes to the same group of
people is actually not a bad idea. That way, the only the people having to
live under the new management can vote for it.

This reasoning has a certain appeal to me even though I know that it 
disregards the contributions by the art team, the translators etc.
On the other hand, as it was mentioned in this thread several times, Fesco 
doesn't really set much policy for their work either. Thus it's an 
acceptable trade off.

As supporting evidence a simple example from the top of my head: The
Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee can only be elected by members of
the ambassador group.


regards,
 andreas




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