Lessons Learned

Thorsten Leemhuis fedora at leemhuis.info
Wed Mar 21 06:20:22 UTC 2007


Hi!

Josh said some good stuff already, no need to repeat all of it. But:

On 20.03.2007 23:34, Christopher Blizzard wrote:
> I honestly believe that Greg, Max, Jeremy, Jesse, and the other folks
> who lead inside of the Fedora community are interested in building a
> community of doing, not a culture of talking.  We respect those who Do
> Things and encourage them.  Jesse, Jeremy, Mike McGrath are good
> examples of this - they are lead-by-doing people and it works.

>From my point of view I'd say it works to get stuff done, but it doesn't
work to get the community involved ATM.

FESCo was good (but still far from perfect) in getting the community
involved, as it had influence in certain decisions and meets in the
open.  With the merge happening now it seem FESCo seems to me much less
important then before; to much small to medium stuff gets simply done
without even bothering to ask FESCo -- that's a fault IMHO. A lot of
medium to big stuff gets directly taken to the board -- FESCo afaics
often gets circumvented, even if the tasks are engeneering tasks. And
that's what FESCo is for afaics.

One example: The "Packaging Committee is responsible for EPEL, too". I'd
say this should have been acked in a FESCo meeting, as FESCo is the
Committee that i responsible for both the Packaging Committee and EPEL.
But it seems the Board simply took it up now and made it effective
before FESCo could even talk about it in a meeting. The result if
totally fine for me as I was one of those that asked for this setup. But
IMHO it would have been FESCo's job to ack it -- after that it could
have been brought to the board (if needed).

Why is FESCo so important to me you might ask? Well, it's the committee
where the community can get heard and get involved in the meeting.
That's hardly the case in the Board meetings -- the broadcasting to IRC
is nice, but it's goes mostly in one direction. FESCo meetings are way
more interactive, and that's IMHO needed to get the community involved.

This and a whole lot of similar really really bothers me ATM and I could
write a whole lot about that. But I'm currently in the waiting state;
the merge is a whole lot of work and I can understand that some things
are not perfect yet and need getting them done is ATM a bit more
important then to make sure we have a proper organization scheme. But
I'd say we really need to work on improving it soon and need to be a bit
more careful.

CU
thl




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