FESCo future

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 26 Nov 2006 19:52:28 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> >> == Constitution of FPCSC ==
> >> 
> >> FPCSC will  needs to do what the "Core cabal" and FESCo do now and
> >> thus will have a lot more work to do than FESCo currently does.
> >> Thus it might be a good idea to make FPCSC a bit bigger. I'd say
> >> 14, 16 or 18 people (FESCo currently has 13 members).
> > FESCO's size is insufficient already. FESCO is not as productive as
> > it could be if there were more members.
> 
> So you suggest even more members?

Yes and no. 

No, when more members just fill seats and don't do more than voting
quickly on proposals which are expected to come out of the community.

Yes, when a high number of members (or all members) are occupied with
unknown things (or multiple responsibilities in various Fedora
sub-projects and committees) and cannot spend any time at all on driving
things forward.

The term "meritocracy" has been used again and again. So I suggest a
committee consists of members, who actually pursue relevant things they
have declared as their goals, e.g.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/SteeringCommittee/Nominations-062007

and which may have been the primary reason why the community has voted
them into the committee. And in order to be able to pursue their goals in
their spare-time, they must find a compromise between the multiple places
where they like to contribute something.

> >> * inactive members get thrown out (we sooner or later need to
> >> define how inactive looks in detail; not showing up in the
> >> meetings, not participating or following FPCSC work, ...)
> 
> Anything else we {sh,c}could do to prevent such problems in FPCSC?

Well, the answer starts in the part you've put in brackets. You need to
find out what responsibilities or duties (regardless of whether this is
about volunteers) members of a committee have and whether it's possible to
let individual members cover specific areas of a committee's activities.

If most of the community representatives only sit in a committee and wait
for unknown action items, which might be added to a schedule, that is
quite unproductive. Preferably, individual members of a committee focus on
specific fields of interest which are beneficial to the project and the
community of contributors, who are part of that project.

> > Only if the
> > decision require additional work, this can be delegated to external
> > contributors.
> 
> I'm not sure if we are talking about the same stuff. I for example want
> that the Packaging Committee mostly works on its own in the future and
> decides nearly everything own its own. Big decisions just need a
> explicit ACK from FPCSC or maybe need to be developed together.

Splitting off the Packaging Committee only means that FESCO should be able
to allocate the freed time for other things. That doesn't work too well if
it's the same people who are in both committees, though.

> > Ideally most of the expertise is available in the committee, and the 
> > committee does not wait for community folks to influence the passive 
> > steering.
> 
> Hmm, I'd prefer to have the community directly involved so they can
> realize want they want and don't have to wait until a FPCSC member finds
> time to work on a issue.

Too vague to comment on. You sound quite a lot like you refer to things
which don't need any committee. However, for several other things *active*
steering is needed (agenda, roadmap, policies, sanctions, directions e.g.)
and can only come from a committee.