Meeting:Board meeting 2007-03-27

= Fedora Project Board Meeting (2007-03-27) =

Attendance
Present:
 * SethVidal
 * PaulWFrields
 * RahulSundaram
 * RexDieter
 * JeremyKatz
 * MaxSpevack
 * GregDeKoenigsberg
 * MattDomsch
 * ChristopherBlizzard
 * Donald Fischer

Not Present:
 * BillNottingham

Notes/Summary
IRC Log: this meeting wasn't logged on IRC, because we talked about several reasonably private topics.

General Business
Donald Fischer

The first 40 minutes of the meeting was spent talking with DonaldFischer, Red Hat's VP of Online Services. Previously Donald has led the Mugshot group, and also been the product manager for RHEL. Donald's Mugshot team has been doing a tremendous amount of work in the Fedora space, and he wanted to take some time to tell us about it, and begin thinking about how it can play into Fedora 8's feature set.

The best link to look at, in order to get an idea of the vision:
 * http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Big_Board_Design

We'd like to stress that this wasn't the Board deciding "we're going to put all of this directly into Fedora". It was Donald showing off (on behalf of his larger team) a lot of the things they are playing around with, and wanting the Fedora community to be up to speed on it.

One of the things that was discussed was the fact that Fedora 7 will allow a group like Donald's all the tools necessary to put together a "Experimental Desktop" spin anytime they want, which can be really useful for testing and getting their ideas into people's hands in a very consumable way.

Live USB

Jeremy indicated to us that LiveUSB keys are close to becoming a reality. It will basically be Jeremy's decision as to whether we can do a LiveUSB key or just plain LiveCD for the Red Hat Summit.

Fedora Board and Fedora Engineering Steering Committee

Max summarized his recent conversation with ThorstenLeemhuis in which they discussed the fact that the Fedora Board is inadvertantly poaching some of the topics that are more appropriately discussed by FESCO. Examples include (1) EPEL guildelines, (2) release schedule details, and (3) status checks on the most important Fedora 7 features.

The Board needs to do a better job of *understanding* what is going on with all those items and being informed, but not necessarily making the decisions itself -- that takes away a bit from FESCO, which should have the first opportunity to act.

Further clarification can be provided, but the general sentiment was agreed upon by all.

General Fedora Board stuff

We talked about the need to do a better job of making it clear how the Board's decisions (at least the controversial ones) are made, and indicating whether there is generally consensus in those decisions, or if there is a lot of dissent. The next time a "tough" decision is made by the Board, there will be more conversation about it in this way.

We are also taking the steps necessary to figure out how the Board succession will look, since there will be some changes after Fedora 7. Right now this is being discussed on the private fedora-board-list, but it will jump over to fedora-advisory-board soon. It is also being discussed  on the wiki.