[fab] I have a few questions for the board.

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2006-04-24 at 14:14 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
...

And for the  real ten million dollar question -- what's the difference
between a project/PMC and a SIG?  I don't think trying to answer your
questions makes any sense without understanding that first.  Especially
as thus far, any blessing as such has been ad-hoc at best.

For taking a pass at trying to brainstorm some of the answers, I think
there are really kind of three different things at work here.  Trying to
fit each of them into the same structure doesn't necessarily make any
sense.  

First is the current PMCs.  These are groups that are formed for
purposes of advancing "a cause".  Good examples include Extras, Legacy,
Ambassadors, and Docs.  They have leadership that's going to tend to be
more committee based with someone in a "chair" type of role.  

A second set would be things which are more "code projects" where the
goal is to write some code and have the software be more of the end
goal.  There's a fuzzy line between this and the PMCs above, but I think
it might be important to explore that line and actually better define
it.  Because software development doesn't work like the advancement of
causes, even in open source -- instead, there tends to be a strong
leader who is the maintainer that has the start of some code and then
other people help work on it.  Things which are big "code projects" in
the Fedora space are more like the Directory Server.  There are also a
lot of smaller examples with things like anaconda or pretty much any of
the other software that we ship and develop ourselves.

The third set are SIGs.  These are things which are probably somewhat
incubatory.  Some of them will grow over time to be be full-fledged PMC
type things (eg, I can see the Extras Games stuff ending up doing so),
some will get past incubation and actually get take-up for code
development (this is where most of the current live CD effort is likely
to end up), some may stay in sort of the incubatory state indefinitely
and some will wither away due to lack of sufficient interest.  I think
all of these could be healthy outcomes depending on the SIG.

This is all just my impression/opinion.  Once there's that, then we can
work out the gnarly details of how do we maintain lists of them, etc.
Plus coming up with cooler names for them ;)

Jeremy