The Fedora Board now has a blog of its own. I had been doing some Board meeting summaries here in my own blog, but that’s not a good long-term solution so with the help of Sijis & Fedora Infrastructure, the Fedora Board now has a shared blog.

That being said, I goofed when I originally added the blog to Planet Fedora, so you may have missed the first post. Here it is, and hopefully the next one will just work when it comes to appearing on Planet Fedora:

Fedora Board Meeting, 13 December 2010

(The meeting consisted mostly of discussions about proposed future goals for Fedora to help us achieve our vision, so it’s definitely worth a read.)

The Fedora Board meeting schedule works as follows:

• Every Monday, the Board will meet via phone at 2 PM Eastern time (1900 UTC atm).
• Every other Friday (the next one is this Friday, 12 Nov), the Board will hold a public ‘office hours’ style questions & answers session in #fedora-board-meeting at 2 PM Eastern time.

Last Friday’s meeting

• Full meeting minutes: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-board-meeting/2010-11-12/fedora_board.2010-11-12-19.01.log.html

Highlights

Here’s a quick summary of questions/points brought up during the meeting. You’ll want to the full log for details on any of these.

• “lots of people ask for help in #fedora-social, how on earth do they run into #fedora-social before they find #fedora” – maybe nick registration requirements play a role.
• Jebba built a bunch of updated f13 RPMS for the secondary mips architecture and is now getting set up koji under mips for fedora 14. According to him, the fedora-mips list and channel are pretty dead, and the guy that did the f13 initial port is mostly MIA. Jebba wondered where he should put the RPMs he is producing. Jared recommended that he work with the infrastructure team and the release engineering team — they’ll find a good home for them.
• Ricky asked, “From the meeting notes, I got the impression that the rejection of sqlninja wasn’t really an application of the new legal text, but more of a specific one-off decision – does the board really want to be in the position of making packaging individual decisions as opposed to just writing/applying the policies behind these decisions?”
• Ricky also asked, “What are current thoughts for other security packages that have similar offensive capabilities? I’d like/hope to see this decision deferred until sqlninja is revisited as spot mentioned.”
• Stahnma asked, “Who from the Fedora board, or anybody in the Fedora community, is consulted about what packages make it into RHEL? And if it’s anybody, is there a process for it?”

Yesterday’s meeting

• Full meeting minutes: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2010-11-15
• Meeting thread on advisory-board-list: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2010-November/009825.html

Highlights

For more details on any of these highlights, please check out the full meeting minutes.

• Stefano from the Debian project got in touch with Jared regarding openrespect.org and is planning to work on an open collaborative initiative, possibly via freedesktop.org. Jared will try to be involved in this. Re: the press reaction to openrespect.org, Jared said that there is no conflict, just miscommunication.
• SQLninja decision – the Board is gathering more information and will revisit the topic when ready. There have been misunderstandings about the connection between the two somewhat related decisions (legal disclaimer + sqlninja-specific decision.)
• Chris Tyler has been working on organizing the elections process. The Board allowed FESCO to extend the nomination period for three folks who missed the deadline.
• An online vendor asked for a non-software goods license agreement to produce mugs with the Fedora logo for-profit. It turns out there may be pre-existing exclusivity agreements so Spot & Jared will do some research to see what we can allow here. The Board also discussed related issues such as quality control of Fedora-branded products.
• A site & twitter page that uses the Fedora trademark & Fedora logo in a way explicitly prohibited in the logo usage guidelines was brought to the attention of the Board… Jared is going to contact the person who owns the sites.
• Community Working Group – Rex has reached all but one nominee, and is working on getting in touch with that person. The mailing list/trac instance for the group will be set up soon.
• Mizmo pointed out that there are some longer-term things we’d been working on that fell off the radar – both setting up a board blog and continuing to work towards meeting our vision for Fedora were discussed. Mizmo will be sending a mail to advisory-board list to kick off some brainstorming for multi-release goals to reach our vision, and asked that all board members come up with 5 to add to the discussion.

Upcoming Board Meetings

• The next Fedora Board meeting will be conducted via phone & Gobby on Monday, November 29. The Nov. 22 meeting is cancelled due to Jared’s travel schedule & the Thanksgiving holiday (making it hard to re-schedule that week!)
• The next Fedora Board meeting after that will be IRC office hours on Friday, December3rd, at 2 PM EST (1900 UTC) in #fedora-board-meeting on irc.freenode.net.

Just as a quick reminder, the Fedora Board has been following a new schedule over the past month or so. This new schedule works as follows:

• Every Monday, the Board will meet via phone at 2 PM Eastern time (1900 UTC atm).
• Every other Friday (the next one is this Friday, 12 Nov), the Board will hold a public ‘office hours’ style questions & answers session in #fedora-board-meeting at 2 PM Eastern time.

Today’s Meeting

• Full meeting minutes: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2010-11-08
• Meeting thread on advisory-board-list: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2010-November/009648.html

Agenda

• Fedora 14 shipped! Hooray! Now let’s get to work on F15.
• Fedora’s Community Working Group- We discussed nominations for the five inaugural members of the Fedora Community Working Group. We voted on 5 candidates and 1 alternate in the case one of the candidates could not accept. Rex will notify the candidates and confirm their participation in the group. Look for an announcement of the group’s membership soon. More details >.
• openrespect.org – does the Fedora Board agree with this statement? – We examined the openrespect.org statement itself, and also reviewed Jono’s blog post on it as well as Aaron Seigo’s response. A number of concerns about the statement were brought up, so we decided to not sign it at this time and provide Jono with some of our concerns and some ideas for improving it. More details >.
• New Legal Guideline – A package review request was submitted for SQLninja, which can be used for exploiting remote systems and may not have many legitimate uses. Spot brought up a couple of decisions the Board needed to make regarding this request – (1) Should we put a statement in our legal guidelines to directly address the issue of packages of free license but questionable legality of purpose? Unaminously decided yes. (2) Should we approve or deny the SQLninja request? Unaminously decided deny. More details >.
• Fedora Elections Process – We talked about the Fedora elections process and how nobody really stepped up to manage the whole thing. Chris Tyler said he has some obligations he’s since taken care of and he can help out more. Jared also noted he will be announcing the hire of a new Fedora program manager soon, and this person could take on the responsibility in future elections. More details >.

Upcoming Board Meetings

• The next Fedora Board meeting will be IRC office hours this Friday, November 12, at 2 PM EST (1900 UTC) in #fedora-board-meeting on irc.freenode.net.
• The Fedora Board meeting after that will be on Monday, November 15 and conducted via phone & Gobby.

I apologize in advance for the brevity of this blog post; I’ve been cranking full-speed ahead on the new http://www.fedoraproject.org with Sijis Aviles and Jef van Schendel and need to get back to it quickly.

The Fedora Board is now fully on its new schedule. What this means, exactly:

• Every Monday, the Board will meet via phone at 2 PM Eastern time.
• Every other Friday (starting with this Friday), the Board will hold a public ‘office hours’ style questions & answers session in #fedora-board-meeting at 2 PM Eastern time.

So, the Board is meeting more frequently, which I think is a good thing for Fedora overall.

This blog post is going to summarize two board meetings: the 27 Sep 2010 Board phone meeting, and today’s public IRC meeting.

Fedora Board Meeting 27 September 2010

• Full meeting minutes: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2010-09-27
• Meeting thread on advisory-board-list: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2010-September/009306.html

The Board for the past two months or so has been working to put together a solid vision statement for Fedora, to help guide what we do. It hasn’t been an easy road, but this meeting was our deadline to have a draft statement so the task dominated this meeting. We happily came to agreement on the following, a modified version of Jared’s proposal:

The Fedora Project creates a world in which free and open culture is both welcoming and pervasive, collaboration and outreach are the norm, and people are empowered to control their own content and devices.

Let me talk about a few points of discussion that came up in the process of crafting this statement:

• “People don’t join communities to join a community, they join because they have matching goals/ideals”
• The vision statement should be a tool we can use to determine if a proposed feature fits Fedora or not.
• The statement was changed to specifically not refer to software, because we felt the vision should talk about our goals/ideals – what we want, not how we will make it happen. Specifics of how to solve problems are in many cases the responsibilities of other folks – the Fedora Engineering Steering Commitee or the Design Team, to name a couple examples.
• Reaching out to new & casual users is implied: if the majority of people in the world look at Fedora and think it’s unusable then we won’t ever achieve our goal stated here. We opted to not explicitly list out new & casual users, feeling it was implied by ‘welcoming.’

Now let me talk a bit about the discussion about the plan once we have a statement voted and in place (next steps!)

• After we select the vision statement, we’ll come up with a set of tangible goals, focusing on specific SIGs/teams and outlining how they can play a part in those goals.
• Everyone should be thinking about the short-medium term – the next 1-3 fedora releases: what goals we’d like to set, not too technically-specific, to meet our vision. For example, if we want to encourage more people to make desktop backgrounds, the Board should only state we want an improved focus on free art, and allow FESCo and the SIGs to figure out what that means to them and have them set the specific tangible goals on their own. (The Board should not be setting tangible goals like, 100 wallpapers by F16 or anything like that.
• Jon Stanley proposed a barcamp session at next FUDcon in January to discuss implementation details of making our vision a reality.

After the meeting, Jared posted the draft to the advisory-board list for feedback and comments.

One other issue came up at the beginning of the meeting – Spot and I gave a brief summary of our trip to FUDcon Zurich. The full details are in the minutes.

Fedora Board Meeting 1 October 2010

• IRC log: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-board-meeting/2010-10-01/fedora_board.2010-10-01-18.01.html

Today’s IRC meeting was focused on questions & answers on the draft vision statement, and finalization of the statement. The concerns brought up by the thread on advisory-board:

• The term ‘pervasive’ is difficult for non-native English speakers to grok.
• The statement’s structure seems difficult to get right away, maybe too many commas.

Another idea we incorporated into refining the statement during today’s meeting was Spot’s idea that the statement should fit in a dent or a tweet – ~140 characters. So at the beginning of the meeting with started with this:

The Fedora Project creates a world in which free and open culture is both welcoming and pervasive, collaboration and outreach are the norm, and people are empowered to control their own content and devices.

By the end we ended up with this (now with alliteration!):

The Fedora Project creates a world where free culture is welcoming and widespread, collaboration is commonplace, and people control their content and devices.

The Board agreed to move forward with the last statement, and will be voting on whether or not to finalize the statement at this coming Monday’s Board meeting.

Cheers!

It’s another two-meeting Fedora Board meeting update. We have been holding some extra meetings in order to kick behind and take numbers the Board ticket backlog. Here we go:

Fedora Board Meeting 10 September 2010

• Full meeting minute IRC log: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-board-meeting/2010-09-10/fedora_board.2010-09-10-18.10.log.html
• Meeting thread on advisory-board-list: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2010-September/009198.html

This board meeting was an IRC meeting that took place last Friday in #fedora-board-meeting on IRC.

Topics Covered

Here is an outline of the topics covered – it was a fully Q&A style meeting:

Question 1: KDE 4.5 in Fedora 14

Camberwell asked:

Sorry if this isn’t the place to ak, but will f13 see the new kde 4.5?

The overall conclusion to this is that it is a question more appropriate for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) and the Fedora KDE SIG.

Jared also brought up that the last Board issued a stable release updates vision statement that FESCo is currently working towards.

Question 2: Board appointments Policy

inode0 asked:

A few weeks back spot proposed something regarding appointments/board approval – anything more come of that?

Jared responded, “First of all, I want to make sure that the Board is working well, and that I have a good working relationship with each member of the Board. After that, I want to make sure that I have a chance to meet with the steering committees (FESCo, FAMSCo, etc.). Once that’s done, I think it’s proper to discuss the governance structure… I would hope that the Board is working well and I’ve met with the steering committees this year, obviously. As for the other changes, I can’t venture a guess. It’ll depend on the proposed changes.”

Jared also noted the discussion should take place before the end of the year.

Question 3: Fedora Project Leader and Blogging

brunowolff asked:

jsmith, do you plan on using your blog more going forward? Paul used to post a lot of Fedora stuff and it seems you are using it sparingly? It seems that this is a good soap box for the FPL to be using for advocacy.”

Jared responded, ” Yes, I do. As I explained in one of my (infrequent?) blog posts, I’m still in “listen to lots of people” mode. I’ll certainly blog more once I have to say. The way I like to describe is like the CEO of a company… you wouldn’t want a new CEO to walk in the first day and start telling everyone what to do, or what they’re doing wrong. But in general, you’re right — my blog should be a good spot for Fedora advocacy, and I can certainly be more vocal there. Please feel free to prod me often if I’m not blogging “

Question 4: Contributor Burnout

skvidal asked:

What can we do to help burnout issues from contributors? I know we’ve seen a fair number of people just stop being able to keep up with the rate and non-stop fight. jwb as a case in point.

Jared answered, “It’s been my own experience that the primary cause for people to leave a project is that they don’t feel like anyone values their input or effort. So my primary reaction is that we need to be better at saying “thank you,” (and that means even if we don’t agree with the person’s viewpoints.) As a follow-on point, there’s obviously a level of negativity and shrill voices in many of our mailing lists. Some people seem to thrive on the conflict in the lists — I know I certainly don’t.”

Matt Domsch said, “We did talk about mentorship and how to on-board more participants in our meeting – briefly… one problem with burn-out is that some people wind up doing quite a lot, and could progress to mentor others, but it is often faster and easier to simply do the work themselves rather than mentor someone new; finding tasks that a new contributor can do, and helping them do it, is time consuming. I have been doing that a lot at work this year, and it is difficult, and can be hard to demonstrate progress. So come performance review time, I am dorked because I did not get a lot done myself, and I have only a few I can point to as having helped them grow.”

Some ideas and points that were brought up during the course of the discussion:

• There may also be value in sending $swag to contributors without making them fly to $fudcon to collect them. (caillon) (Jared mentioned there will be an announcement soon regarding this idea so stay tuned!)
• How about if some people are dedicated ‘teachers?’ (mbroyles)
• The most effective mentoring is casual, not formal, and introducing a mentoring program doesn’t mesh with that. (ctyler)
• One of the things that helps the mentoring process is documentation of standard operating procedures. Having written SOPs helps on-board new contributors more quickly, and obviously helps avoid the “eaten by raptors” problem. (jsmith)
• Show more appreciation for the people who are doing fantastic work, but get little praise. (jsmith)
• Help make sure that we effectively mentor new contributors to help shoulder the burden (jsmith)
• I’m not so sure doing more work (1, 2) is the best way to prevent burnout (mmcgrath)
• Remind people that “You are doing it wrong” is not the same as saying “Could you try this instead next time.” (smooge)
• Saying “Good job” helps a little, but I am going to stop doing the temporary stuff at some point and go back to working on the parts of Fedora I find more fun/interesting to do. That will either happen after the F14 or F15 release, I haven’t decided yet. So what do we do about a situation like that? Someone needs to be recruiting a replacement (actually more like two people)? (brunowolff)
• We don’t have a “Fedora Job Postings” board, but have you tried to publicize the need? Perhaps via planet and/or the lists? (ctyler)
• We either have to recruit more volunteers and help them get up to speed, or decide that “That’s a great idea, but we don’t have the resources to do it now” (jsmith)
• If you’re a Fedora contributor and you’re feeling burned out — please speak up before you hit the tipping point, we want to help!
• I think one of the issues with burnout is that we have a culture of trying to do as much as we can and usually hit a rock before knowing we have taken too much, we then end up saying “No” (in various forms getting worse and worse), and not “I don’t know how.” or “I don’t have time. (smooge)
• Its a shame that there people in the project who are wanting/needing help and then theres people like me who are just joining and anxious to help. Has anyone thought about a position vacant board? (Camberwell)
• We have lots of open positions that we don’t even know exist. They are created by people like you. (inode0)
• there’s an issue of trust – some of the heaviest hit, least flexible, highest-impact positions are ones that require that people who do them be highly trusted. Being available to work on new things means something, that’s true. but we cannot let anyone push pkgs or maintain various services. (skvidal)
• The two best ways to get some mentorship are to ask for it on the mailing list, and then hang out in the IRC channels and show people that you’re willing to help. If you have questions, don’t be afraid to ask. (jsmith)

Fedora Board Meeting 13 September 2010

• Full meeting minutes: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2010-09-13
• Meeting thread on advisory-board-list: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2010-September/009245.html

This board meeting was a phone meeting that took place last Friday at 2 PM, the usual Board meeting time.

Topics Covered

Here is an outline of the topics covered:

General Updates

• Fedora 14
  • Working on blockers. The blocker list is available, take a look and help out!
• Systemd go/no-go
  • FESCo is making the decision this afternoon or tomorrow afternoon. (sep 13)

Ticket Review

• Ticket 11: Respond to Russian Fedora Initiative – We are waiting on requestor(s) to provide trademark agreement. Jared will find out from Red Hat Legal if that was taken care of.
• Ticket 12: Reflect BT stats on download page – Not really a board issue, should be an infrastructure issue. Closing ticket.
• Ticket 25: Correspond with ASL on fedora.org.br changes – Will need to contact Red Hat legal to find out if a TLA was sent out and receieved.
• Ticket 30: Produce actual cases of TM infringement + defense – Goal to give concrete instances of when trademark infringement / defense has happened to gain more support for trademark license agreement process. Jared will contact RH Legal on this one.
• Ticket 49: Improved Metrics / legal concerns – Would be nice to have redesigned smolt screen, keep ticket open for that, F15.
• Ticket 59: Establish organizational structure page – We talked about the problems with this diagram of our organization structure; mizmo will try her hand at fixing it up.
• Ticket 70: Should fedoracommunity.org subdomains point to fp.o? – We voted, unanimously voted that fedoracommunity.org subdomains should not point to fedoraproject.org, and the ticket was closed with that resolution.
• Ticket 80: Ways to improve Board Q&A – Will set up a wiki page to track questions in the meanwhile the suggested software app to handle Q & A is written.

Other Board Business

• Jon requested copy of full thesis from Diana Martin’s anthropology report and sent to board private list – Diana would like to limit exposure of document while it remains unpublished for various reasons.
  • Jon’s first takeaways: Diana had a hard time getting integrated into community. Mentorship issues. Diana also mentioned she’d be happy to help us fix it.
  • Everyone should keep reading through it (there’s an open ticket for reviewing it, ticket #79) and we’ll followup later.

Upcoming Fedora Board Meeting Schedule

Here’s the schedule of Fedora Board meetings for the immediate future:

• Monday, September 27th:Phone meeting
• Monday, October 4th: Public IRC meeting in #fedora-board-meeting

Oh goody gumdrops! You get two, two, two Fedora board meeting updates for the price of one today! Okay, there’s a lot to cover, so here we go…!

Fedora Board Meeting 3 September 2010

• Full meeting minutes: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2010-09-03
• Meeting thread on advisory-board-list: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2010-September/009198.html

This board meeting was a phone meeting that took place last Friday at 2 PM, the usual Board meeting time.

Topics Covered

Here is an outline of the topics covered:

General Updates

• Fedora 14
  • progressing towards beta
  • please help get the word out on systemd test day
  • Systemd go/no-go decision is up to FESCo.
  • Jared will be starting convos to examine our features process / with FESCo.
• Meeting time
  • Set up a whenisgood.net to Board members. Seems that 2 pm on Mondays works well for all.
  • Transition plan: Final friday meeting will be Fri Sep 10, followed by a Monday Sep 13 meeting.
• Is the Board working as it should?
  • email from Sankarshan
  • Board members should be having more discussions on the mailing list and using meeting times to make decisions
  • Board members should speak up on the list more often, a few do but could be more
  • Suggestion to make a blog for the board as an alternative communication medium to the advisory-board list
  • We have a lot of tickets to go through and we’re not doing so well on tickets (but only 12 outside of fedoracommunity.org domain requests)

Ticket Review: Outstanding community domain requests

• Ticket 72: lu.fedoracommunity.org – Belgium & Luxemborg. Fine with it if lu.fc.org points to be.fc.org, as a forwarding address. mdomsch will clarify if that’s the intent with the requestors.
• Ticket 73: arabic.fedoracommunity.org – this is a language request vs. geography but that’s okay. Still need to see sample content for what they are looking to post. Language sites okay if they aren’t confusing with namespace for country codes.
• Ticket 74: dk for denmark? dk for language or country? – if it’s for a language should be full language name. If it’s for a country or region, it should be country code. Let’s standardize on that and deal with odd cases as we need to.
• Ticket 75: China (zn, ch, tw) – cn is the country code, they should get that according to the standards. zn is not a country code (but we did grant an exception to the greece one as a bounce, Spot says this would be a similar exception – use it just as a redirect)

Meta meeting discussion

We have not a lot of time left and a ton more tickets. Let’s add an additional phone meeting next week on Wednesday to try to get through the backlog, before folks leave for Zurich. (Agreed by all).

Other Board Business

• IRC Meetings – so far have been more like office hours. Let’s keep doing IRC office hours bi-weekly and do phone meetings weekly to get on top of things. Since this is a big time committment, maybe not every board member has to show up for every office hours?

Action Items

• #action jsmith to update meeting times on wiki page (wiki/Board, wiki/Board – past meetings info box)
• #action mizmo & jstanley to talk to mmcgrath about setting it up on the existing fedora blogs system blogs.fedoraproject.org
• #action mdomsch to ask luxemborg peeps if they intend to put lu.fedoracommunity.org as a redirect to be.fedoracommunity.org – https://fedorahosted.org/board/ticket/72
• #action Rex to start conversation on his concern with the updates vision to get to a point it can be thumbs’ed up or thumbs-ed down
• #action Jared will be working with marketing team on start.fedoraproject.org, mentioned to Robyn but not whole team yet so will follow back up on

If any of the above topics pique your interest check out the full deal at the full meeting minutes.

Fedora Board Meeting 8 September 2010

• Full meeting minutes: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2010-09-08
• Meeting thread on advisory-board-list: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2010-September/009219.html

This board meeting was a phone meeting that took place today at 4 pm – an extra meeting the Board schedule to take care of the super-long backlog. The meeting ended up lasting almost 1.5 hours.

Topics Covered

Open Tickets

• Trademark Licensees – Do we have a list of trademark licenses we’ve given out to check in on? We have fedoracommunity.org and https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Trademark_licensees
• Ticket 77: Israeli domain request – We made it easier to use fedoracommunity.org, but we aren’t prohibiting the use of other TLDs. +1 to granting a trademark license for use in their domain name, fedora.org.il. – approved
• Ticket 78: Vision statement -
  • we had a lot of discussion on this but didn’t get very fair (IMHO)
  • Our deadline for a vision is Sept. 27.
  • The thread on the advisory-board-list didn’t go so very far either so it was suggested we do an open IRC meeting in #fedora-advisory-board on irc.freenode.net.
  • More details on that IRC meeting here – please fill out the time chart and come if you can and are interested.
  • We also decided to come up with 5-6 mini-goals as a group. Each board member is to come up with two (mini-goals are actionable goals to get closer to vision, example one is, focus on floss webapps for next 2-3 releases) by Monday 13 Sep.
• Ticket 79: Anthropology Report -
  • Report seems to indicate we need a formal mentoring program
  • A lot of positiveness / positive energy in the report, is there a way we can make the findings more public?
  • mizmo to post whiteboard photos from report review session w lmacken (post to advisory-board list and trac ticket)
• Ticket 81: start.fedoraproject.org – jsmith went to the marketing meeting; they decided to discuss on the marketing list so jsmith will kick off that discussion.
• Ticket 82: Charter for Community Working Group – Rex was unable to attend this meeting; he’ll update us on this next meeting.
• Ticket 83: Revisit Updates Vision – There was a lot of discussion here, both about some of the contraints/hardships particular folks against the policy face, plus negative affects on users when applications vs. the base platform are frozen from version updates. Towards the latter point both kopers and a backports repo were discussed as potential solutions. The Board decided to not change the language of the updates vision for now, and agreed that FESCo should be notified that they do have the power to grant exceptions to the policy, although they should write up some criteria for granting and rejecting exception requests as well as not change the updates vision mission statement.
• Ticket 84: Annual User Survey – It was suggested we look at how OpenSuSE does their annual user survey. It was noted such studies are generally quite expensive (10′s of k’s at least.) We’ll need to define a scope, target, and goal for the research.

Upcoming Fedora Board Meeting Schedule

Since the Board meeting time is shifting a bit, here’s the schedule of Fedora Board meetings for the immediate future:

• Friday, September 10th: Public IRC meeting in #fedora-board-meeting
• Monday, September 13: Phone meeting
• Monday, September 20: Public IRC meeting in #fedora-board-meeting
• Monday, September 27 Phone meeting

The meeting today was a public meeting on IRC (#fedora-board-meeting on freenode) and lasted 1 hous. We continued to follow the new meeting format we introduced during the last IRC. The next meeting will be at the same time next Friday, and will be held over the phone.

By the way, I missed last week’s phone meeting, so I didn’t blog it (I was getting fitted for my wedding dress. ) The minutes from that meeting are available, so check ‘em out if you are curious.

Log Links

• Minutes (html)
• Minutes (text)
• Log

Introduction

• inode0 thanked spot and others for their tireless work on the Sun RPC-licensed code relicensing, and many attending chimed in with their words of thanks.
• mizmo mentioned sgallagher’s proposal to advisory-board-list. jsmith said we’ll discuss it further when we have a draft vision statement.

Question 1: Decentralized Technical Direction?

Are we disperse and unfocused on technical direction?

skvidal: “Fedora doesn’t have any one group/person who oversees technical direction or sets goals. Do you think that means we end up being disperse and less focused?”

Matt Domsch disagreed with the initial assertion – “that is FESCo’s (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) role,” he said, and Spot agreed.

Jared agreed as well, “I may have a naive understanding, but I personally think FESCo should take that the lead in the technical direction and decision making role.” Jared continued, “One of the things that I’d like to discuss with FESCo is whether or not *they* think they have that role.”

With no authority to direct developer resources, are we doomed to unfocused development?

Following up, Seth asked, “FESCo has no authority or any developer resources to direct. So they can sing and dance all they want, but without any capacity to DO anything. If that’s the case, then is Fedora as an organization doomed to unfocused development?”

“Last time I looked, the only one here who can direct other people’s work on a day-to-day basis is Spot,” Matt pointed out.

Spot offered, “I’m not necessarily against figuring out if there is a way to put some of Red Hat’s devel resources at FESCo’s disposal.”

Jared stated that he was “open to proposals on how you think we can get more traction within FESCo.”

Continuing with another follow-up, Seth noted, “Spot sadly cannot direct the Desktop Team folks, as far as I know, to focus goals for Fedora, or to defocus things which are non-goals. It seems without that, we’re at the whim of whatever someone happens to be working on. and whether or not it can qualify as a ‘feature.’”

Matt responded, “Spot can’t direct me either, but clearly having a manager isn’t a prerequisite to being a contributor who gets things done.”

“I see most work/change being driven by individual developers, groups/sigs, etc. that’s where the fun happens,” Rex responded.

“But if you work on renovating ‘foo’,” Seth replied, “and foo is something everyone uses – you can deeply impact the distro.”

Spot replied, “I don’t think it is impossible for FESCo to have some say in where paid Fedora development happens, whether it is desktop or not.”

“As a board, we set the overall vision for Fedora,” Jared said. “But we depend *very heavily* on individuals to do the heavy lifting. FESCo should take a role in making the technical decisions regarding features, major changes, etc. In general, that means that we are sometimes dispersed and not working in unison.”

Matt added, “FESCo does get to approve major changes, or NAK them if they so choose.”

Can FESco stop commits?

“So, in short,” Seth said, “If there is an organization or sig who can direct developers and they have influence over important pkgs, then they win, defacto. It can’t stop their committing, not without a fistfight. I mean, FESCo couldn’t stop the KDE commits. It still can’t. If someone has commit access to a package, FESCo can’t stop them.”

Colin replied, “It should be able to, at least if there’s rough consensus they’re screwing things up, especially if it’s part of core.”

Rex added, “FESCo (or whoever) can impose sanctions, if required, for those not playing nice.”

“Well, yes,” was Matt’s reply, “but if push comes to shove, FESCo could restrict someone’s commit access if they were making commits that directly conflicted with FESCo’s direction. FESCo could also have rel-eng untag builds.”

Caillon responded, “I do think a FESCo-like thing should eventually be able to help direct, but if we want to be able to do that, we need to make Fedora more about coding and less about packaging. I think also we need to decide to ship a product that everyone can get behind, not just poop out something every 6 months because its time.” A couple of folks noted that “poop” was probably not the best choice of words, despite an earlier remark regarding burritos.

Jared tried to clarify Seth’s concern: “Are you arguing that FESCo should be able to override them? Or that FESCo is powerless? I’m not sure I follow your train of thought.”

“Exactly,” Seth replied. “Either FESCo has to have authority, or they are powerless. Those are the two choices.”

“Are you willing to write a proposal for the Board to consider that picks one of those two sides and runs with it?” asked Jared.

Seth answered, “I don’t think a proposal is possible without buy-in from various management inside Red Hat to enforce FESCo guidelines internally.”

“Well, we need to do that,” said Colin.

“I didn’t think there are sides to pick (really?),” said Rex, “it should be obvious that FESCo has the power to enforce the policies/rules it makes.”

Seth replied to Rex, “It is not obvious to me at all, and I was onFESCo for long enough to see that.”

“Ok, let’s make it happen then,” replied Rex. “What’s in the way?”

Caillon noted that the question had overrun the 8-minute limit, and Jared encouraged Seth to continue the conversation on the advisory-board mailing list. Jared concluded the discussion with, “It’s clear there are a lot of mixed feelings about FESCo in general, and we’d like to try to come to a resolution of some sort.”

Question 2: Funding and organizationof Fedora Activity Days

inode0: “Speaking of resources, as Red Hat Community Architecture funds are more and more spent to support development through FADs (Fedora Activity Days) does it make sense to have some group make those decisions? Perhaps FESCo for some of those funds?”

Matt asked, “Let FESCo spend the CommArch money and plan FADs to further its goals, so it doesn’t feel as powerless?”

Jared pointed out that FADs are primarily organized through FAMSCo, and inode0 asked, “Is the right way?”

“Some FADs have been organized around development topics,” Matt said. “It could be organized any group that wants a FAD, and within the budget constraints.”

“This isn’t just about turning them down or funding them,” said inode0, “it is also about encouraging them where they are beneficial.”

Matt suggested, “FESCo can propose FADs to further its goals.”

“FESCo could maybe just take a more active role in doing that,” inode0 agreed, “regardless of the funding source.” Mizmo and Jared also agreed.

Question 3: FESCo and Enforcement

notting: “With regards to FESCo becoming more of an enforcing body… Historically, there’s been a reluctance to … suggest … to contributors that their energies are better focused elsewhere. If the Board would like FESCo to be a more enforcing body, does that mean they are OK with taking a stronger stance in this area?”

“Gee, we’re really grateful that you’ve electrified the toilet seat,” joked Spot, “but maybe that’s not what we need right now.”

“Yes,” Matt responded, “Otherwise, what does setting direction mean?”

Colin said, “I don’t see how it’s any different from rough consensus of a project’s maintainers not allowing bad code in.”

“I think we agree that if FESCo is going to make technical decisions, it needs to be able to say no,” said Jared. “We might disagree about the exact details, but in general, the answer to your question is yes.”

Mizmo agreed, “From a user experience perspective I think its more important to say no then yes.”

FESCo and the Board working Together

“To add onto that,” asked mmcgrath, “does the Board think FESCo should be making “should” decisions as well as the “can” decisions they’re making now? FESCo seems to be a policy and approval body right now, it doesn’t seem to be focused on what Fedora should be. It’s just making engineering decisions. so Fedora’s been engineered, not designed. Does the board think they should be pushing FESCo to step in more into the design of what Fedora should be?”

“Hmm,” said Colin, “I wouldn’t say ‘design,’ but ‘technical direction,’ probably.”

“And I wouldn’t use the word ‘pushed,’ either,” Jared added. “I don’t think it’s as much about ‘pushing’ as it is ‘working together.’ I think FESCo should work together with the Board to make sure they share the same vision for Fedora, and then work together to realize that vision.” He continued, “Right now, the Board is working on their vision statement. When done, we expect to consult with FESCo to get things lined up behind said vision.”

Mizmo agreed, “I kinda think the Board and FESCo should design fedora together as a product with the Board setting the vision and FESCo determining how to best make it happen technically. Having the vision will help define the major problems – what’s a problem in the context of one vision might be a positive in another.”

“I would agree with “technical direction” as being a responsibility of FESCo,” said Spot. He noted he would love to see FESCo and the Board say “these are some big problems that we’re going to rally the community to solve.”

Matt added, “We’ve already started to do just that… There’s a back-and-forth on what the Board really means by the stable updates policy, for example.”

Should & Must & No

“‘Should’ and ‘must’ are two dangerous words to say to a volunteer,” said inode0. “Be careful using them in their direction.”

“Careful, I agree,” chimed in Matt. “But we shouldn’t be scared to use them too.”

Jared asked, “What would the RFCs look like without “shall” and “must” and “should”? We obviously need to be considerate (and even compassionate?), but we must also draw some boundaries.”

Jon responded, “I sort of think that they have to be used. And, as mizmo so eloequently put it, the word “no”.”

“I think 37signals says something like ‘say no to a feature request the first three times, consider yes the 4th time.’” Mizmo added.

Jared added, “Or, at a minimum, ask “Why?” until you get to the root of the problem, like a famous car manufacturer used to do.”

Question 4: Target User

skvidal: “What’s our target again? I was looking for it in the wiki and I couldn’t find it.”

“There’s a wiki page, but i can’t find it either!” said Mizmo.

skvidal replied, “Maybe it shouldn’t be QUITE so hard to find?”

Mizmo provided a link to it: http://lwn.net/Articles/358865/, still unable to find it on the wiki. Nirik was able to find it on the wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_base. A summary of the target user for Fedora is as follows:

We found four defining characteristics that we believe best describe the Fedora distribution’s target audience, someone who:

1. is voluntarily switching to Linux
2. is familiar with computers, but is not necessarily a hacker or developer
3. is likely to collaborate in some fashion when something’s wrong with Fedora
4. wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either using desktop applications or a Web browser.

skvidal said, “So we’ve precluded servers from the target. That’s fine, I just wanted to confirm it.”

“Primarily due to the lifecycle that doesn’t tend to match server deployments,” said Matt.

The meeting today was a public meeting on IRC (#fedora-board-meeting on freenode) and lasted 1.5 hours. It was the first time we tried out a new format. The next meeting will be at the same time next Friday, and will be held over the phone.

Log Links

• Minutes (html)
• Minutes (text)
• Log

Introduction

• Matt Domsch is on a plane and won be able to join us.
• We’ll start today’s meeting with general questions and answers from the community.
• Our new meeting protocol is documented here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board_public_IRC_meetings
• In general, “?” means you’d like to ask a question, “!” mean you’d like to comment on the current question, and “eof” means you’re done talking.
• We typically do 40 minutes of Q&A and leave 20 minutes for other board business.
• No more than 8 minutes per question so at least 5 questions can be reached.
• Board members can speak without moderation, in the interest of not being too slow.

Question 1: Schedule

jjmcd: “In view of our recent slip, is the Board as passionate as poelcat about learning how to keep a schedule?”

Jared responded that he is very sensitive to it and doesn’t like seeing it slip. Jon said he doesn’t like to see it slip either, but the reality is that things come up. Jared said he doesn’t want us to ship something simply because we reached a date on the calendar – there’s got to be some human judgment on the right balance between the two. He feels our Go/No-go meetings give that the right balance.

Smooge said that he’s inured to slippage, as the installer has often faced last-minute OMG realizations. Máirín agreed and noted that the installer folks work very hard but without a working installer there’s no distro, so that team is far less able to make mistakes than other package maintainers are. Jared also pointed out the installer has to adjust to many other changes in the distro frequently, and Rex pointed out anaconda is almost always highlighted for blockers, and schedules are captive to those being fixed. In this situation the anaconda folks have gone out of their way to help get things in shape. Jon suggested that FESCO look at considering anaconda freeze earlier.

Question 2: Vision

mizmo: “I was wondering if we can work on a vision statement for Fedora, because I think a lot of conflict in our project stems from not having a clear vision.”

Jared answered, “Absolutely… It’s one of the things I’d personally like to work on over the next month or two. I certainly have my own vision of what I think Fedora is and should be, but I want to work with all the key stakeholders (the board, steering committees, etc.) to make sure we’re all working in concert with each other.” Smooge also noted, “I wanted to say that it has been on my mind. I have been reading various books and wondering about the various ‘vision/mission statements.’”

Jared also said, “In general though, I think we’re probably closer to agreement on “vision statement/strategy” and less in agreement on “tactics”", but mizmo disagreed, “There’s definitely a consumer camp and a for-techies camp that do not always see eye-to-eye.” Jared responded, “Sure… but I’ll be honest, I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. I’m gonna be honest — I’m not treating anything (well, OK… maybe anything except the four freedoms) as sacred things that can’t be revisited/discussed.”

Jon responded as well, “The real goal is somewhere in the middle of that…. the previous boards have come up with something. Not saying that we shouldn’t revisit it, but this has been done.” Mizmo responded, “That’s target audience though, vision is what you do with it. The techie camp sees Fedora as a bucket of parts, the consumer camp a polished desktop experience. Techie camp sees more emphasis on development tools, etc.” Jon said, “It has to be a bucket of parts that can be put together ” Mizmo replied, “but do you call it a bucket of parts?” Jon replied, “Yes and no. The default configuration should be a put together bucket.” Mizmo continued, disagreeing with the suggestion, “Or have a bucket of parts and call that a standard / ABI / SDK? Language is really important and we’re lazy with ours. Fedora is a community, a desktop, a bucket of parts – it’s too confusing.” Rex agreed, “I would agree terminology needs to be improved.”

inode0 brought up a point, “Since Fedora is a community, this sort of thing might be worked on by the community rather than the board to begin with.” Mmcgrath answered, “The community has no facility to make decisions.” inode0 also suggested, “another review of how the wikipedia people do this sort of thing.” Jared asked if inode0 could write a summary to advisory-board list on how Wikipedia does things, and inode0 agreed to see that someone does, mentioning that rbergeron understands their process better. Robyn spoke up and said she would be happy to summarize it. Jared also encouraged anyone else to bring up these sorts of things on the list. Jon also noted he’d like to see more things discussed on advisory-board list in general. Caillon also pointed out there was a study posted on the list a while ago that helps outline the wikipedia stuff.

Mizmo noted the Fedora website redesign has been very difficult without a defined vision.

Question 3: Code maturity for inclusion

EvilBob: What is the board’s opinion on using something like systemd that as I understand it is still being coded this close to a release? Shouldn’t core code be a bit more mature before inclusion? systemd is but an example. I know this is mainly a FESCo thing but surely the board has an opinion.

Jared replied, “that’s more of a FESCo decision.” Spot agreed that FESCo is free to make that call. Jon also agreed, and said that one of the four foundations is “first.” Stickster pointed out, “I saw that jsmith posted something to the devel list saying he would like to see FESCo taking a more active role in tracking/managing technical development in Fedora.” Mizmo lamented, “Since we dont have a vision who knows if fesco’s policy on the matter meets it :-/.”

Jared concluded with, “In general though, my attitude is that sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Let’s just be careful about how we break the eggs.” Chris Tyler pointed out, “separating ‘first’ and ‘on fire’ can be a challenge,” and Rex also said, “and to balance who many eggs we’re willing to break to get there.”

EvilBob responded, “In this case if it blows up in “our” face it will reflect on the board. That being the case the board should have an opinion IMO rather than passing the buck.” Jared responded, “Sure… all decisions reflect on Fedora as a whole, and on the governance in particular…” and continued to say, “Please understand — I’m not playing ‘pass the buck,’ The buck stops here.That being said, they’re the ones tasked with making the judgment calls on technical features, and whether they’re ready or not for inclusion.” Rex agreed, “the buck stops here obviously, so it’s in all of our interests that core tech pieces do not fail. So, in that regard, if we, as the board, see fesco flying down to fail-ville, it’s our job to step in to help right the ship.” Jared also pointed out to EvilBob, “The Board can obviously go back to FESCo and overrule them, etc.”

Stickster queried further, “Can you elaborate on how you envision that expanded role for FESCo? What’s an example or two of roles/actions you think FESCo could take up for technical management?” Jared answered, “One of the hard things FESCo has to do is say “yay” or “nay” on the new features. A couple of things I would like to see include: 1) Making things more clear as to what constitutes a features being “100%” ready or “90%” ready; it’s not always clear what that means. 2) The other thing I would suggest (not really relevant to this discussion) is to make it clear which types of things should go through the “features” process, and which types of things can just be added as package updates (or new packages).”

Nirik pointed out, “I would just like to note that FESCo holds all it’s meetings in public on tuesday afternoons. Feel free to bring concerns up there or in a ticket to fesco. If there are widespread fears about systemd, please provide TECHNICAL feedback to help fesco decide about it.” Smooge also pointed out, “I think that to be innovative we are going to need to have a VERY high bar for thinking something is going to be FAILville. FESCO is an open body and not a cabal,” and mizmo responded, “but that’s not a great position to have if say having a usable consumer desktop is important.”

Question 4: Meeting protocol

rbergeron asked, “We are asking a lot of questions in this public meeting – not all of them will be answered or agreed on as far as concensus in an 8-minute period. Is it possible for us to keep track of these questions and make sure they are answered somewhere – or at least given a timeline for actions to be taken – so as to not have an hour of opinionating? “

Jared answered, “In general, discussion should happen on the advisory-board list. I prefer to use board meeting time for answering questions and making the tough decisions. I’m sure others who have much more experience on the board than I do may see things differently. Yes, there will always be discussion in the board meetings, and that’s healthy… but not everybody can attend the board meetings in real time.”

Mizmo said, “I dont think IRC is a great place to make heavy decisions – not in this format. There should be an agenda if its to make decisions.” Jared agreed.

Robyn asked, “Can we perhaps follow up the meeting with what the consensus answer is to questions asked?” Jared answered, “One of the things I’m looking at is a better tool for keeping track of the questions asked and the answers presented, so that I don’t have to keep answering the same questions all the time ”

Stickster poined out, “This forum was conceived as a way to make sure community members know Board members are listening to their ad-hoc concerns. It’s always easier to capture an action from that when the question leads directly to a decision point, like “How do we collect data to figure out if ___ is a problem?” or “What should we do to make $PROCESS work better?”" Mizmo asked in follow-up, “How does the agenda for board meetings that are not Q&A get determined? These Q&A sessions should have an affect on that agenda,” noting that she is a new board member and really has no idea.” Rex answered, “Ask jsmith to add it to the agenda, is usually all it takes. doesn’t necessarily have to be a board member asking either,” Jared responded, “Yes, the agenda comes from items brought up in the advisory board list, as well as other things brought to my attention.” Stickster said, “at was part of how I set the agenda in the FPL role — also input on the advisory-board, and specific situations that come up elsewhere in the Project where it seemed the Board was needed or could be useful.”

Jared said, “If you have items you’d like on the agenda, please let me know — I accept patches ” Mizmo asked, “Is there a wiki page where the running agenda is stored? It’s hard to submit a patch without the code ” Jared explained, “I usually build it from Trac tickets with the “meeting” keyword. Board members can obviously create tickets with that keyword to get them on the agenda.”

Mizmo said, “It seems like robyn’s indicating a lack of followup, or maybe a worry about a lack of followup.” Robyn said, “I am just saying – if there is something to be answered, can we call out the clear answer – if there is something to be followed up on, can we please define it, and get a timeline, or at least have someone responsible in the meeting for kicking off that followup on the advisory board list. Just for these public IRC q&a’s – It’s one hour, and we have a lot of community members, and I’d like to see that time well-used, questions answered.” Jared replied, “I’ve started investigating tools that will help with that” and noted he hopes to hae a better answer in the future.

Stickster brought up these blog meeting summaries and suggested they could be a guide in producing whatever’s necessary to track items brought up, and mizmo offered to file and reference trac tickets when posting the summaries. Jon mentioned the trac tickets are private, and if referenced folks cant view them. Jared concluded, “Again, I don’t think we need to answer the technical decision of “how” in this meeting.”

Question 5: Fedora Board Composition

inode0 asked, “I see several negative effects of Red Hat retaining structural control over the composition of the Fedora Board. What benefit does the Fedora Project get from this arrangement? Would anyone on the Board be in favor of transitioning the rest of the appointed seats to elected seats over the next few releases?”

Jared responded, “In general, it’s all up for discussion. Red Hat obviously puts a lot of resources into Fedora, and wants to see that its resources are used wisely. That being said, I’m open to discussion.”

Rex, Spot, and Jon asked which negative effects inode0 was referring to. Inode listed three effects:

1. prominent community members declined to run for the board and this was one reason given (Spot asked, “really? aside from kkofler, i didn’t hear that from anyone.”)
2. It reinforces the view (right or wrong) both inside and outside the Fedora family that Red Hat exerts a lot of control over the project
3. It confuses at least me in understanding the relationship between Red Hat and Fedora (are we upstream with Red Hat as an important participator, or is the community participating in an internal Red Hat project)

Rex asked, “I forget, how many appointed seats are there at the moment?” Caillon answered, “4 appointed, 5 elected.” Spot pointed out, “I think RHT has done an admirable job with the last several round of appointments, and I also think it is a nice way to reflect Red Hat’s investment and involvement in Fedora.” Jared said, “I’ll be honest here — Red Hat pays my salary, but I still feel like an outsider looking in.” Smooge said, “#1 I think that it does not have a large effect because because those same people either don’t run for FESCO or think its too political.”

DiscordianUK pointed out, “I think for example CentOS regards Fedora as upstream.” Rex pointed out, “I would consider the project leader and board chair position appointment to be “enough”, but that’s just me.” Smooge pointed out, “For #2, making it 100% elected would not change the view that Red Hat does not exert lots of influence on the project because well it pays for pretty much everything.” Colin also said, “large amount of “influence” i’d agree with, and it’s hard to avoid when the company invests as much as it does in terms of people and money; as far as “control”, let me assure you there’s no evil master plan.” Jared and Caillon also pointed out the number of deelopers employed and infrastructure provided. Caillon said, “I think that #2 is still okay, because with all elected seats, it is possible (and honestly, not beyond the realm of possibility) to get a board full of Red Hat employees. with appointments, that is unlikely to happen.”

Brunowolff said, “I think that being able to fork Fedora is more important than the board membership. I have been seeing improvement along those lines throughout Fedora’s history. That says to me that Red Hat is guaranteeing their future behavior.”

inode0 followed up with two points:

1. there are respected and very valued contributors who aren’t running because they don’t feel the board can ever really change from one view to another because of this structural constraint
2. there is really no evidence that the composition of the board would look much different whether it was entirely appointed by the FPL or entirely elected – so this is I think more about perception in the short term

Ke4qqq wondered, “I wonder if some of those problems couldn’t be mitigated with term limits.” Jared asked for clarification on which problems h meant. Ke4qqq replied, ” specifically inode0′s original #1 – but also his second #1.”

Inode0 pointed out, “Removing the structural control of the composition of the board would empower the community to *actually* reform the board if it felt that was needed.” Smooge replied, “that would require an elective that is interested in voting or forced voting. Basically too many people DON’T vote to make a difference.” Rex responded, “it obviously goes both ways. voting apathy perception about not making a difference.”

Jared said, “I can’t speak for the rest of the board, but I’m certainly open to suggestions on how we can make Fedora stronger.” inode0 suggested making the Board elected. Rex said, “I’d like to at least consider the idea proposed, about reducing the number of appointed seats… sometime over the next few months.” Jared concluded, “OK… in the interest of time, let’s move the discussion to the list.”

Update: Smooge did so, and the discussion has now started on the advisory-board mailing list.

Topic: Updates

As everyone is probably aware, we had our Go/No-Go meeting and the Alpha release candidate did not pass the release criteria. The schedule has been pushed back a week. I see that there’s active discussion on the lists about how to improve the process, and as long as we’re learning from our slips, we’re making progress.

Topic: Other Board Business

In last week’s board meeting, I asked each of the board members to go through the list of board tickets in our private Trac instance and see what tickets can be closed. There are a number of items that are in limbo. I didn’t see much action on that front this week, so I’m going to make an extra effort this week to close as many as possible. I especially need the input of people who have been on the board for a while, as you’re probably more in-touch with some of these issues than I am.

Mizmo pointed out a Board discussion about revealing sensitive private issues discussed by the Board once they are no longer sensitive/private, as Jared explained “That we open up private matters after some embargo time, with the possible exception of personnel matters, so as not to embarrass said people. We’ll need to work through the details on the list, but in general, I think we’re all in favor of more transparency. In short, there are times the Board discusses private matters (usually things that would damage relationships if discussed openly — personnel matters, fiduciary matters, etc.) We certainly want to be very careful about those things, but in general, there are items that can be revealed publicly at a later time. mizmo graciously accepted the task of helping us to keep track of said items, and I thank her for that.”

Meeting Format

Stickster asked, “Do the Board members agree the change in the way the meeting was run was helpful? Or did it cause obstacles for you?”

Mizmo answered, “It was much easier to take notes this time – last time it took over an hour to unravel the spaghetti. I’m all caught up at this point.” Jared said, “I personally thought the change of IRC protocol helped eliminate confusion, but it did lengthen out the conversations.” Chris Tyler said, ” I think it was a good improvement.” Rex chimed in, “I liked the format, thought it a fruitful balance of discussion vs organized productivity.”

Jared pointed out, “We may need to schedule more time to properly address more questions (or convince people to ask more questions on the advisory-board list).” Mizmo replied, “Asking questions to a mailing list though, there’s no guarantee of a response. So i can see why people wouldn’t.” Jared said, “I think we’ve been pretty good at responding to questions on the advisory-board list.” Mizmo responded, “Well I’m just saying in general, I don’t think the list has been socialized that way, even if it does perform. Fedora lists in general do not. The list doesnt have a description, nor does it say it’s a place you can ask questions https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board – I actually wasnt even subscribed to it as a community member until a year or so ago, i didn’t know what it was. I thought it was board members only. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board#Contact doesn’t say it’s a place to ask questions, it says its a place for the board to discuss.”

Jared suggested using the list to discuss how to make the list more visible as a place to ask questions. Rex said, “Mizmo’s concerns are valid, having a better description of the list in mailman and on wiki would be definite improvement.” Jared took an action item to get a better description of the advisory-board list, and blog about it.

The Fedora Board didn’t meet this week nor the last due to various travel and other events going on. So this was the first Board meeting in a couple of weeks.

This week’s meeting was a private phone-based meeting, and it ran a little over an hour. Paul Frields was the meeting secretary and took the notes, which he published to the Fedora wiki. So check them out there, and if you have any questions or feedback on them, there’s a thread on advisory-board list you can respond to.

Topics Covered

Here is an outline of the topics covered:

• MeeGo Spin status
• Upcoming FUDcons – Zurich and Tempe
• Deadline for dealing with open Board tickets
• fedoracommunity.org domains – how are they going & shall we approve the open requests
• Community Working Group idea from Rex
• start.fedoraproject.org
• Vision for Fedora

More detailed notes on each topic are available in the full minutes.

Resources

• Meeting minutes
• Meeting thread

The Fedora Board did not meet last week – the meeting was cancelled due to the transition of leadership between Paul and Jared.

Let me give you a quick update on the action items from last meeting:

• jds2001 to help skvidal with tech side of FAS account name displayed per planet user as needed. item complete
• mizmo will bring up some alternatives and additional solutions for the fedoracommunity.org portal on the advisory-board list. That thread is here, and work is on-going to develop a nice portal for fedoracommunity.org. I’ll be blogging about it here very soon.
• mizmo talk to seth re FAS ids on planet and file infraticket if needed. Ticket filed, complete. Now mizmo needs to update the planet template to use the new FAS attribute.

Log Links

• Minutes (html)
• Minutes (text)
• Log

A New Meeting Format

The board meeting today experimented with a different format than previous meetings. Rather than having a separate #fedora-board-questions channel, we allowed everyone voice in #fedora-board-meeting and had an open discussion. We started with Q&A upfront and then decided about halfway to make the entire meeting Q&A.

The new format wasn’t perfect (a lot of different topics were interleaved with each other at the same time, making the raw logs a little hard to follow!) but there’s definitely benefits to it. The format will be discussed at the next Board meeting and we’ll discuss where to go from here with the meeting format!

Mizmo’s Meeting Summary

Anthropology Report

The meeting started off with a question from brunowolff:

“Does the board have initial impressions of the anthropology report?”

Mizmo responded, “I think it points out that while we’re awesome at collaborating, we need to improve our on-boarding processes! ~80% of our contributors have been here 2 years or longer – we need new blood and we need that knowledge in oldtimer folks’ heads to be shared with new folks.” Jon added, “+1. I think that’s a problem in any organization though. There’s plenty of tribal knowledge, be that in Fedora or anywhere else.” To which Mizmo replied, “I think though, it’s hard to feel comfortable enough to ask until you get your feet wet, it’s that initial experience of getting your feet wet we need to make easier. once someone has accomplished their first project and have gotten positive feedback on it, i think they feel more comfortable getting involved in other projects – easier to dig the tribal knowledge out ”

Jared also chimed in: “I think it was worthwhile… I have a bit of a background in market research, and will be interested to dive into it deeper when I have a chance. But my initial impressions are that there’s a lot of data there we can use to improve the Fedora experience (both from the distro and community side).”

Paul answered, “In answer to your question, my impression was that it shows that people get involved in Fedora for many different reasons.”

Challenges for FPL

Dennis asked, “What do you see as the biggest challenge in your starting weeks/months?”

Jared replied, “We need to continue to push Fedora development, and to make the Fedora community more inclusive. I’m reminded this week at FUDCon at the barriers to entry that are there, not because we’re trying to be exclusive, but because of language and cultural differences for example… My biggest challenge in the beginning is to find ways to get buy-in from all the parties involved so that we can push with a concerted effort. I’d rather make it a collaborative effort.”

Legacy Support

Next a question about legacy support from Devilment followed:

“There was a discussion last weekend in #fedora-uk about why isn’t there a Fedora LTS. RHEL/CentOS was mentioned as filling this role and how there used to be Fedora Legacy, which ended up folding due to lack of volunteers, IIRC. There is nothing to prevent a third party from providing LTS to a Fedora release, but would we ever see anything official again?”

Smooge responded, “I can speak to some of that. It is quite open for other people to do long term support on things which is what we were looking for in Legacy. However many of the people looking to do it found that they didn’t have the resources to expend. Thus an LTS is something that would probably fall onto the sponsoring company (eg Red Hat) to put the resources into it.. to make it successful.”

Jared added, “I don’t have any immediate plans for a Fedora LTS… the rapid development cycle and community-driven nature of Fedora doesn’t really lend itself to long-term updates. If I had a full-time staff and ten times the infrastructure, I’d be happy to explore it from the community standpoint.”

“We have infrastructure challenges to face with that,” Jon pointed out. “lt is a noble goal, and seems to have a not-insignificant amount of popularity among users, but apparently not much support among anyone able/willing to do the work to make it happen (a *lot* of work),” Rex said.

Sijis asked Devilment, “What do you consider LTS? don’t we already go back 2 releases?” Devilment responded, “I’m happy with the status quo of ~13 months. I thought I’d raise the question so I can feed back to the person who was arguing for Fedora LTS.”

Mizmo also asked, “Do you think there’s more community interest in maintaining something like that now compared to the old long term support program we had that died due to lack of interest?” Paul replied, “There was a group of community members who voiced some interest again last year, but I haven’t seen the results of that process.”

MeGenius asked, “Are there any plans to change the cycle of fedora releasing??” to which Jared replied, “I don’t think we need any major changes to the develoment cycle. We may adjust from time to time to make it seven months (or possibly eight) should the need arise, but I don’t see us moving to a much slower release cycle. It’s very hard to continue to push innovation with a slower release cycle.”

Paul said, “The stress always gets more visible as a previous RHEL or CentOS release ages. I would imagine that when RHEL 6 is released, with many of the desktop features that people have seen mature in new Fedora releases, the pressure for LTS will drop precipitously.”

Meeting with SIG groups

Sijis then asked,

“A couple of months ago, there was an effort to meet with different SIG groups. honestly, i haven’t kept up with it has there been other ones besides web and design? if not, is this expected to continue going forward?”

Paul answered, “That’s a good question for jsmith — but just to give a bit of background, the Board has held numerous meetings with different SIGs over the past few months. It’s up to the current Board whether they want to continue that practice. I would encourage it, because it helps when the Board is aware of challenges of different Fedora teams, and participates directly in resolving them.”

Chris Aillon agreed, “I enjoyed them, fwiw. I’d be in favor of continuing to do so, actually.”

Jared followed up with, “I want to continue to work with the SIGs, but as a board we need to decide the best way to interact with them. My general rule of thumb is “give them the tools they need, give them some mentorship, and then get out of the way.”

Sijis concluded, “Sure. I thought it was beneficial to hear what other groups are doing and what challenges/assistance they may need.”

Rolling Releases

MeGenius asked a question about Fedora versioning and update policy:

“Have you even thought about canceling the version system, i mean, pushing updates directly?”

Jared answered, “It’s been discussed, but I’m personally not a fan of “rolling releases. There needs to be some point where we produce installable media.”

Rex pointed out, “That’s largely what rawhide *is*.”

“we can’t be *everything* for *everybody*, or what we end up with is just average (or worse the lowest common denominator). That being said, I think we can be *most* everything for *most* everybody. We *can* and *should* be a leading Linux distribution, which gives users and devs the tools they want and need (if not *the* distro, obviously.)” Jared added.

Paul concluded, “And I would go further to say, leading in that space means we have the opportunity to solve problems that are common to ‘most everybody.’”

ZFS Support

VisBits asked about ZFS filesystem support:

“Can we get native ZFS support in fedora ?”

Dennis replied, “When licensing is sorted, I’m sure it will come.” Jared added, “We work from upstream kernels… get it pushed upstream, and we’ll have it.”

“I wouldnt hold my breath with current events,” Jon warned. Chris provided a link with more information: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/

Spins SIG

Brunowolff pointed out:

“Note that the Spins SIG was (and to some extent still is) very close to totally failing. We need to get spin owners more involved. How to do that is an open question.”

Jared pointed out that “The board is happy to accept suggestions on concrete ways the board can help improve that.”

BH-Alex pointed out: ” What about spins? I’ve tried to use revisor to make my own, but it’s been broken since Fedora 10, despite submitting bug reports. What does the Spins SIG need, I might have some time.”

Brunowolff brought up his Spin owner documentation plans: ” I have a plan to better document roles to set expectations for spin owners and to hopefully make it easier to volunteer for the special roles of lead and wrangler.” Jared thought this was a good plan.

Paul recommended the Board examine this issue in more depth. “the Board should devote some time to thinking about the health and well-being of the Spins SIG. When I hear brunowolff say he wants spin owners to be “more involved” it gives me some concern.”

BH-Alex asked, “What is wrong with the Spins SIG currently?” somewhat confused as to the backstory of the discussion. EvilBob pointed out: “From what I hear “Not enough Indians”. lots of grand ideas and little in the way of getting it done.”

“Would the Spins SIG benefit from a trimmed down mission, short-term?” BH-Alex asked.

Paul then said, “Spin owners provide an “official” Fedora release that’s been approved by the Board. I think it’s important that the results are successfully passing through a process that ensures the results work well.”

“I would like to say that A) We need to talk with them before we can say that and B) I would need to know who the members are,” Smooge said, wanting a bit more information about the issue.

EvilBob asked, “How are we promoting the spins that are new and innovative along with the other spins that have been approved?” Paul’s response was, “In part through set-aside areas in our talking points and other marketing materials.”

BH-Alex: “Aren’t Spins just built from kickstart files? Why does it appear that a lot of resources are required to successfully produce a spin? From running cobbler and livecd-creator I’ve found kickstart to be wonderful and easy.” Brunowolff answered, “QA is busy enough with the main spins (Desktop and KDE) that they can’t test the other spins. The Spins SIG needs to do that.” “So if I understand correctly,” BH-Alex responded, “it’s a manpower issue combined with a what-the-public-wants issue?” Brunowolff continued, ” The ks files need review. For example Dan Walsh wants to make a kiosk spin but currently is doing it in what we suspect is a bad way. But we don’t have someone that can work with him to fix things up.” Chris Aillon pointed out, “brunowolff, arguably, they should be doing that anyway. different spins look to provide different experiences. something which works as expected on one spin might be considered a bug in another spin.”

BH-Alex then asked, “What would be the end-result of Spins SIG were disbanded? From looking at http://spins.fedoraproject.org/ downloads are low?” Mizmo pointed out, “Downloads are low because the counter is reset every release. Those numbers don’t reflect the F12 downloads which were quite large before we reset the counter.” Chris added, “I don’t think downloads show the full picture; some spins are duplicated heavily by those involved with them.” Sijis also said, “the spins stats are just torrent downloads too, not direct download ones.” Jon pointed out, “some stats are at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics.”

“It seems to me like Spins itself is problematic because of the difficulty to assemble the ‘experience’ — wouldn’t it be beneficial to have the Base Fedora install then have “profiles” (a list of packages provided by the spin-author) that can be made available?” BH-Alex pointed out. Chris responded, “part of the point of spins is that you can run them live, and can install them directly.” “Is that true of all spins?” asked BH-Alex. ” I believe so,” responded Chris. “I think we need to re-examine the spin technology in the light of the “sudden overlay failure” issue (when run from USB, affecting SoaS particularly) as well as fedora-embedded/arm/mips/mini needs.”

“this sounds like something more technical and less board related,” Dennis pointed out. “The idea is worth discussing,” said Paul. He concluded the topic with a suggestion: “Why don’t we take the idea to the spins@ list for more discussions.”

Enabling Contributors

Dennis asked:

“How can I as a regular fedora contributor feel like i can take ownership of some task or segment of fedora. How are we going to make sure that contributors feel enabled?”

Jared provided an extended answer to this question – ” First of all, they need to know what Fedora is and what it represents. Second, they need to have a support network — people they can ask questions to, preferably in their locality and language. Third, they need to feel their involvement is welcome and valued. Fourth, we need to make it clearer both how they can contribute/participate/lead, and what the steps are to do so.”

Dennis replied, “Great. now to make sure that we take the steps that way.”

Chris pointed out, “There’s getting started as a user (straightforward) and getting started as a contributor (less straightforward).” Jared suggested an improved website as being key to helping with this, “One thing I really want to push is some improvements to the website. More details to come… but in general, we need to do a better job of telling the Fedora story and how it meshes with the open source way.”

“We happen to be approaching the third phase of a website redesign,” Paul informed everyone. Phase one (F12) was the spins.fp.o site; phase two (F13) was the get-fedora* pages; phase three (F14) is the main http://www.fp.o page.”

Fedora Forums

MeGenius brought up his interest in the forums, “I want to see some imrpvments on the forums.” Jon pointed out “unfortunately, the forums are not run by Fedora, but they have a trademark license.” MeGenius asked if he could create his own forum, and Paul answered, “Yes, with some limitations. This is a question best asked on the advisory-board list: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board – Also check out http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Local_community_domains.” MeGenius pointed out, “the forums with the current situation are not that helpful – a lot of times, duplicated threads are opened, for example.” “Forums take quite a bit of herding for that to not have that problem,” Smooge pointed out. Rex also brought up that the problem “happens everywhere, irc, mailing lists, forums.”

“i want to see a helpful problems solving directory,” MeGenius said, “a user can refers to it, before asking any questions in the forums or the irc channels.”

Paul gave MeGenius a suggestion – “Have you considered talking to the forum admins and offering some help there directly?” But the topic died off at that point.

Getting Non-Coders Involved

Devilment asked a question about non-coders:

“Not everyone is a coder, so may feel they cannot contribute back to the Fedora Project. How can we get non-coders more involved?”

“I don’t know C to save my life ” replied Jon. Rex pointed out, “There’s plenty on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join not involving coding.” Dennis agreed – “there is so much of fedora not at all involved with code we need to make sure that those sections are visable to all.” “i guess reporting bugs, suggesting feature .. etc..” suggested meGenius.

Paul talked a bit about the Fedora join page: “Although our ‘join’ page is in need of some work, we do clearly indicate there’s plenty of ways to be involved that are non-code related.”

Mizmo made her agenda not so secret! “Join the design team We post bounties specifically for brand-new contributors, no coding required. http://mairin.wordpress.com/category/fedora-design-bounty/” Jared also pointed out, “Design, docs, marketing” as areas non-coders can help out in. “Contributor doesn’t always mean coder,” he said. Paul also suggested: “Bug reports, documentation, translation, design, …” Smooge agreed, “well there are a lot of places for non-coders (I am one of those). Design, QA, Ambassadors, proof-reading the Wiki.. there are lots of areas. However most of them are technical based versus social.”

Dennis suggested, “Could this stuff be mentioned on the anacoder installer screen? something like, “You don’t have to be a programmer to contribute back to Fedora. See for details.”

Question for Jared: Ponies

Jon asked, “What are you going to do to give us all ponies?”

Jared replied with a Fedora analogy: “Great question…. I see Fedora (and operating systems in general) like ponies… You don’t just buy a pony and forget about it. You have to feed it, clean up after it, and take care of it. I hope that when my tenure is done, we can look back at all the ponies we’ve helped raise :-p”

Question for Jared: T-Shirts and Swag

Mizmo asked: “i have a question that’s very… different than the current ones and perhaps stupid. is there real value in the number of t-shirts we produce? could we be doing something to provide more value for the $? i’m kind of an eco hippie and i feel really bad about the number of shirts, but maybe it’s because i have so many. maybe most people dont.”

Jared replied, “I’m open to suggestions. I think the t-shirts fill two important purposes — they give something tangible for participants to take home, and it serves as marketing.” Rex added, “or swag in general, but I figure t-shirts are the biggest $$ item at the moment?”

Dennis suggested, “perhaps we can do a plant a tree for me/give me a t-shirt option for events.” Jared also suggested, “When we do create t-shirts, it may make sense not to tie them to one particular meeting or date.” Mizmo suggested virtual swag, which Paul noted “Virtual swag interestingly ties into spot’s idea for contributor karma.” Smooge pointed out, “Red Hat for the first 5 years was paid for by swag sales. We were a company that sold you a T-shirt and gave you a Cdrom.”

The point was brought up that the shirts could be sold to fund contributors travel or FUDPub food. But Paul noted there are some issues with Fedora accepting money, and that there’s a lot of discussion about the issue in the advisory-board list archives.

Mizmo pointed out, “I think in some part tshirts are wasteful – i think whenever we produce something we should think about how it’s going to die if that makes sense.” Dennis said it would be nice to have all-organic swag in the next 5 years.

Paul started a thread on the topic on the advisory-board list for further discussion.

Jared’s Background

Rex asked, “For some background, what first brought you to use/contribute-to fedora, and prior to becoming fpl, where was most of your interest in fedora?”

Jared responded, ” Good questions… I started using Linux around the RH 4.2 / 5.0 time frame. And I was lucky enough to have an employer that encouraged me to learn it well, and gave me plenty of time to do so. When Fedora was born, I continued on as a user, but wasn’t much of a contributor. I’d post bugs from time to time and try out the betas and follow the -test list, but wasn’t really a contributor. Over time, however, I started to get involved in the docs project. I’d done some work with DocBook and publishing, and wanted to help contribute. stickster then tricked me into coming to my first FUDCon in Raleigh.”

(note at this point stickster swapped his nick to be tricky_stick. hehe.)

Jared continued, “That’s really what energized me to be a more active participant. rom there, dgilmore and jcollie encouraged me to help with Fedora Talk, and so I got into the infrastructure a bit. The rest, as they say, is history. Based on my own experience, I hope we all take the time to help others have that same sort of “ah ha!” moment.”

Board Salary

meGenius askd, “excuse me, but, do the board members have a salary for being board members??”

Paul responded, “No. The FPL is a paid position at Red Hat, whose duties include chairing the Board. Some Board members, elected or appointed, are paid employees of Red Hat, but are not paid to be on the Board in particular. They do it to better serve the Fedora community and to help make a difference through active leadership.”

Mizmo added, “meGenius, i work on the Board for the pleasure of serving you, not for buckazoids ” Jon also added, “there are several members that are not employed by red hat, both elected and appointed.”

Conclusion

Well there you have it, the latest Fedora Board meeting!