[fab] I have a few questions for the board.
Greg DeKoenigsberg
gdk at redhat.com
Tue Apr 25 17:42:50 UTC 2006
On Tue, 25 Apr 2006, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > Leader (perhaps aka maintainer), absolutely. Chair of a committee,
> > yes, but dependent on size of the project of course.
>
> Agreed -- we shouldn't be imposing that everything which is a project or
> SIG be run like it's a government.
Not saying we should. But somebody needs to be accountable for the basic
tasks of every PMC, at the very least. Meaning:
* Someone who holds periodic meetings, and makes sure that the
appropriate people know about them and attend them.
* Someone who ensures that *simple* public minutes are provided for these
meetings. i.e. a few paragraphs, max.
* Someone who keeps an updated list of "tasks to be completed", and drives
people to complete the tasks they've promised to complete.
* Someone who has the authority to make hard decisions -- or failing that,
acts as the conduit when the Board makes hard decisions.
>From my perspective, these are the items that differentiate a PMC from a
SIG. A PMC has a clear charter to "get stuff done" -- and the mechanisms
by which the PMCs do that should be as consistent as possible, so that the
outside observer can stay informed without too much trouble.
What I am *NOT* talking about:
* Someone who holds lots of votes.
* Someone who omphaloskepsizes endlessly about Procedural Issues.
> Especially in cases where we're talking about chunks of coding, strong
> leadership in the form of a project maintainer is likely to often work
> better. This is one of the things which is often pointed to as a reason
> for why the Linux kernel is more successful than the various free BSDs
Strong coders are great at moving a project along, but they tend to suck
at communicating the progress of the project -- and that communication is
one of the big things that's missing. People just don't have time to
follow every mailing list to keep up; even the Board will be incapable of
it. This kind of high-level communication also takes time and effort to
do well, and it can be thankless.
Maybe the coder-project-lead appoints someone to do this work. Doesn't
matter, really, but ultimately, the Leader is responsible for everything
getting done.
Here's what I'm basically asking for, I guess -- maybe a simple wiki page
that looks like this:
===
OFFICIAL FEDORA PROJECTS.
Fedora Extras.
* Mission: The one-paragraph missions statement that
every Fedora PMC should have.
* Project Lead: Thorsten Leemhuis (link)
* Meetings: (whenever)
* Minutes: (link) (maybe to a blog / rss feed?)
* Tasks: (link)
Fedora Docs.
* Mission: ...
...and so on, and so on.
It also calls these open questions:
1. Is Fedora Directory Server a real project, by this standard?
2. How about Fedora Translations?
3. How about Fedora Live CD?
===
SIGs, on the other hand, can be dead simple. Just a descriptive paragraph
and a link to a mailing list.
My $0.02.
--g
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