Meeting:Board meeting 2009-01-27

= Fedora Project Board Meeting :: Tuesday 2009-01-27 =

Roll Call

 * Present: Paul Frields, Bill Nottingham, Chris Aillon, Seth Vidal, Matt Domsch, Dimitris Glezos, Chris Tyler, Spot Callaway, and Jesse Keating
 * Regrets: Harald Hoyer
 * Secretary: John Poelstra

Followup to Previous Business

 * Last meeting: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/Meetings/2009-01-20

Trademark Guidelines Slowing Down Community?

 * Discussion was to be moved to fedora-advisory-board@redhat.com
 * No discussion observed on the mailing list
 * Some board members re-reviewed guidelines since the last meeting. Key points from today's discussion were:
 * Fedora is trademarkable world-wide
 * Trademark guidelines on the wiki seem rather long--could a summarized version be created?
 * This is generally not advised as it has the potential to create a second legal document
 * Handling of domain name registration (and payment) by Red Hat on behalf of Fedora groups
 * Local groups can choose to register their own domains, need to sign the trademark agreement.
 * Alternatively, Red Hat can handle the domain registration and ownership
 * Does not require execution of trademark agreement
 * Domain name points to the organization's servers
 * ACTIONS: No further discussion

"What is Fedora?" Discussion

 * Discussion continued from last week's minutes on fedora-advisory-board list
 * https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2009-January/msg00048.html
 * The board recognizes this question needs to be answered and spent a significant amount of time discussing:
 * Who should answer this question and other questions it raises?
 * How the questions should be answered?
 * What does answering these questions mean to the Fedora Project as a whole?
 * The Board explored the topic somewhat, but its complexity and importance demand further discussions
 * ACTIONS Discussion will continue on 2009-02-10.

Comments and Observations (brainstorming)

 * The bullets below capture the free flow of the ideas and issues raised
 * The discussion represented many community concerns from varying points of view.
 * The Board realizes that there are differing opinions on these issues.
 * Therefore, these are not the final views or decisions of the board and should not be construed as such
 * Current web page is very vague and wide-ranging: https://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview
 * Enthusiast definition is very broad
 * How well does this the marketing plan capture things?
 * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/Plan#TARGET_AUDIENCE
 * Is it the Board's job to define "What Fedora Is"?
 * Is it the Fedora Project Leader's job to define Fedora and its purpose?
 * What problems would the board be solving by doing this?
 * How would it affect the day to day operation of Fedora?
 * Could it help the focus of individual developers and what they work on or consider a priority?
 * What would be the purpose of further defining Fedora?
 * Is it to be able to tell more people "no we don't do that?"
 * Does it intentionally or unintentionally try to answer the question of whether Fedora competes with Ubuntu or not?
 * Is having a "desktop" and a "server" focus a strength or a weakness?
 * Which teams are responsible and accountable for setting default applications in Fedora?
 * Some are specified by individual SIGs
 * FESCo?
 * Some are not clearly defined?
 * Would it be useful to directly address the ongoing question raised that our supported release cycle is not long enough as part of "What Fedora Is"?
 * Is it worth considering extending support timeline another two or three months?
 * There are no guidelines about what type of updates should be pushed and when
 * History has shown that individual judgement is not always good as each maintainer uses different criteria
 * By not clearly defining what users Fedora is not for it is hard to make good design decisions
 * By restricting Fedora to a subset of users could we disadvantage current or unforeseen contributors?
 * What is Red Hat's role in defining Fedora's purpose?
 * Does the role of Fedora need to be defined?
 * What guidelines are there around what Fedora cannot do?
 * Not directly compete with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
 * Distill what community is doing now and what we are good at?
 * Is it better to have a concrete descriptions of what Fedora is versus vague notions of what we want to be: "We only use free and open source software"?

Status of FUDCon F11 Survey

 * survey is in the process of being created by a person inside Red Hat that has access to the survey tool
 * board will get a preview once created and then send out to the community
 * Paul Frields is requesting that the Red Hat Community Architecture Team administer this survey at all future events

Next Meeting

 * Date: 2009-02-03
 * Time: 19:00 UTC
 * Location: irc.freenode.net
 * Moderated channel for board answers: #fedora-board-meeting
 * Public channel to ask questions: #fedora-board-public