Elected/Appointed Board

[Max Spevack]

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008, Jesse Keating wrote:

> Actually we have FESCo, the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, 
> which is wholly elected, and often the place where real decisions get 
> made. The Fedora board is good at setting high level goals and 
> desires, but it really comes down to FESCo and the other committees 
> (like releng, packaging, spins, etc...) to turn that high level ideal 
> into tangible decisions and direction.

+1 -- in fact, after we merged Core and Extras together during the F7 
timeframe, a lot of people were asking "well, what happens to the Fedora 
Extras Steering Committee".  I, knowing myself well enough to know that 
the best thing I could do for Fedora was *not* pretend to be an 
engineering manager, was one of the people who advocated for morphing 
FESCo into the body that could handle the day to day engineering actions 
of Fedora, and that FESCo was also the body *best qualified* to handle 
it, and trusting that FESCo would elect the *right people* to the 
positions, regardless of where they worked.

Not suggesting that it's all been a trivially easy process, but we 
definitely have a track record of trying to push decision making power 
into the hands of the community as much as possible.

One of the things that I told Paul when he took over from me as FPL was 
that still undone on my List of Goals was giving the various VIPs within 
Red Hat one last explanation of why the Right Thing To Do with Fedora is 
to turn the board over into a 5-elected/4-appointed configuration.

In my mind, at least, it was always the plan that we'd end up there 
eventually.

Paul's running with that ball now, so I'll leave further updates to him.

--Max