FESCo critique (was: Re: [Bug 178162] Review Request: libgeotiff)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Hi All!

Michael Schwendt schrieb:
> On Mon, 30 Oct 2006 12:21:59 -0600 (CST), Jima wrote:
>> On Mon, 30 Oct 2006, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>   Okay.  In that case, when the next election comes around, nominate 
>> yourself.  If you find yourself constantly at odds with so-called "Fedora 
>> Leadership," then take a stand and try to become part of the solution. 
>> Remember, Fedora is largely self-governed.
> Interesting comment, albeit somewhat over the top.

I don't think so. We are a community driven project. Nobody gets payed
for his work in Extras. If you think something should be changed in
Extras land write proposals, show them to the community, get them
discussed on public lists (FESCo members are encouraged to participate
in the discussions and speak up directly there if they don't like
something) and find a proposal/a solution that fits most contributors
(we are to many people in between, you probably often won't find a
solution that fits all contributors -- that sucks, but that's life).
FESCo work after that part IMHO should simply be a "okay, seems the
contributors want that this way, it looks acceptable, so we do it".

But complaining only and waiting for others (e.g. FESCo) to do the work
won't help to much. Endless discussion over details without a proposal
FESCo can vote on won't help much, too.

Simply writing a proposal and presenting it to FESCo after a public
discussion will -- and you don't have to be a FESCo member for that.

> Do remember that with
> the last FESCo "election" primarily we just filled vacant seats in a very
> half-hearted and controversial way.

I'm looking forward for the next election and your detailed suggestions
what do to better.

> Before the next election a lot must
> happen. The FE developer community needs means to measure whether they are
> happy with the elected representatives. That is not possible when FESCo's
> decision-finding process is not documented, when some FESCo members either
> abstain from voting often or always [or because they are absent from a
> high number of public meetings], and when this leads to sort of anonymous
> FESCo decisions (where only with high effort or luck you find nothing more
> than a few +1/-1 votes in meeting-minutes).

As I said: If you think something needs to change propose a scheme.

But I like the way the meetings are ran currently because it helps
getting stuff done without to much overhead. And I want to keep the
overhead down as much as possible because there is so much we {sh,c}ould
do ( http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/Schedule/IdeasContainer ).
I'd also like to to keep down FESCo importance as much as possible and
Extras "self-governed" as far as possible.

> At the topic of FESCo, just a few days ago I was surprised that I could
> not find the FESCo members' mission statements anymore. It turned out the
> page was deleted without any (or without an easy-to-find) replacement:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/SteeringCommittee/Nominations?action=recall&rev=27

Thanks for complaining. But remember: It's a wiki. If you want something
 written down there feel free to do it yourself.

In this case I did fix it myself because I was the bad guys who
accidentally deleted that page in a "let's clean up the Extras/ section
in the wiki". How does it looks like now? Acceptable? It took me only
two or three minutes. Probably not more much more time then it took to
write the four lines from your mail.

Cu
thl