[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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