RFC: Release team meetings

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Jesse Keating schrieb:
> On Friday 13 April 2007 01:05:05 Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> I'd further would like to see more informations what the Release Team is
>> (number of people and names), how it is constituted (approved, elected,
>> mixed?), who's responsible (chairmen?) and what its works areas exactly
>> are (what remains FESCo work and what will the Release Team take care
>> of? and when does the Board get into the game?).
> 
> It's things like this that start to frustrate me.  Sure it's neat information 
> to have, but for the sake of getting a few people together to get some work 
> done, I really don't want to have to go through the headache of creating all 
> this red tape and governance.  Now, I don't think that some of this is bad to 
> have, it just makes the barrier of entry to having a group of people work on 
> something pretty daunting.  It's part of the reason why I _haven't_ yet 
> created the sig page for the release team, thinking about this crud gives me 
> a headache.

I can feel with you and understand your point. But that *IMHO* the
overhead you have to live with if you want to get the community
involved, as they afaics want to have a chance to influence stuff if
they spend lots of their time working on that stuff (Fedora in this case).

But that overhead IMHO worth the trouble *if you do it right*, because
the community then will do work that you otherwise would have to do. But
if you don't do it right it can easily fail and you have some overhead,
but get nearly nothing back, or even worse, you have to continue to do
all the work.

Further: One of the reasons for merging Core and Extras afaics (correct
me if I'm wrong) was that the community showed well what they can do if
you let them -- that includes the working structures (e.g. governance
modell) . And during the public merge discussions it seemed to me that
it was important for some of the important people that FESCo stays to
exist as it worked well and the community felt represented by it.

But it seems to me we are working in the opposite direction: FESCo still
exists, but it seems to me it is less important than before. And there
was a lot of chaos in the past months -- the hectic ACL implementation
for example. The merge reviews and the rules around it (e.g. blocker
bugs vs. flags). Lots of other minor stuff.

I first said "okay, things are new to everyone and everything will work
out to something good somehow" but I have reached the point where it
seemed to me that things are not improving; in fact they were getting
worse. Some people told me in private they were unhappy and concerned as
well. And that why I'm pressing on this whole "governance" issues ATM,
to make sure the community still feels well involved and represented.
Getting that roughly right from the start of the merge imho is quite
important, as it will influence Fedora in the long term quite heavily.

Sorry if that's creating a headache for you.

CU
thl