Meeting:Board meeting 2006-04-07

Board >   Meetings  >   2006-04-07

= Fedora Project Board Meeting (2006-04-07) =

Attendance
Present:
 * MaxSpevack
 * ChristopherBlizzard
 * RexDieter
 * PaulWFrields
 * JeremyKatz
 * BillNottingham
 * RahulSundaram
 * SethVidal
 * MattDomsch

Not present:
 * ElliotLee

Meeting Details/Administrative
1. How should we meet? The time matrix makes meetings difficult, with at least one person blocking out weekdays and one person in a very different timezone. We acknowledged that IRC is not the ideal method for communication for this group, due to the high bandwidth that telephone offers. DECIDED: conduct as much work as possible over email, and schedule  phone meetings  twice a month.

2. We have a bit of a bottleneck for mailing list support provided by Red Hat. For example, he made the request for a fedora-board-list two weeks ago. We recognized that there are repairs being made to the overall mailing list system which are holding up requests currently. We expect to have our list in place soon. UPDATE: this is now complete. Contact the board here.

3. We discussed the governance policy. In particular:


 * How will succession and election be handled? We need continuity and proper inclusiveness for elections.  Rotating elections for community seats makes sense.  Voting privileges need to be assigned to some traceable attribute, such as CLA completion.  There may be groups such as Translation, though, that have non-CLA contributors.  For any such attribute "bar," we need to make sure that all contributors have the opportunity to attain it.


 * How do Red Hat seats work in this process? JeremyKatz opined that the policy would probably depend on who's involved most in Fedora, and on who holds the actual "Fedora Project Leader" position in Red Hat.  There is no sense in trying to handle these seats by election.


 * Where is business conducted? How do we keep decisions transparent, while ensuring the board can have disagreements or conduct sensitive business discreetly?  UPDATE: this is now complete.  Contact the board here.

General Business
1. We want to lower as many barriers as possible for community members who want to contribute. We need a location in the wiki for each sub-project that enumerates the steps to get started. Any global requirements (CLA, etc.) should also be enumerated, and this process needs to be as simple as possible. To a great extent we should be automating this process into a single point of entry. The Board needs to assign ownership of reviewing our current status and acting on this.

2. Live CD (Kadischi) -- Lots of people like the idea of this project, but there are still some problems to solve. We should empower people to take the reins, but if they hit a roadblock we need to find a way to assign them some help, without simply (a) taking the project away, or (b) saddling Red Hat developers with new work. DECIDED: JeremyKatz will take up the cause for Kadischi.

3. Free Media -- on-disk.com is a burn-on-demand web site that has graciously volunteered help for this project. We need to automate the process of sending addresses for fulfillment. Pogo Linux is doing the same thing, we need to see if we can work with them also. UPDATE: Thomas Chung has reached out to the Pogo Linux folks, MaxSpevack is riding shotgun on this if help is needed.

4. Single sign-on capability -- This may be somewhat of a misnomer because Bugzilla will probably always require its own authentication. But we may be able to hook CLA/CVS and Plone/Wiki. SethVidal advised that Plone has features for authentication but not authorization. We need more information on the Website Project's plan for how Plone will augment or replace the Wiki.

5. Education/Music -- Fedora people at LinuxWorld held a lengthy and fruitful discussion with LTSP, which was located at a neighboring booth. They love us, and we love them back. We also have a good relationship with PlanetCCRMA, which is a music authoring and production oriented repository and project. Would it be a good idea to pull these contributors closer to Fedora if they are willing? It certainly supports the goal of having Fedora grow beyond its current focus, and letting the community drive the distribution in ways that Red Hat hasn't thought of or pursued. UPDATE: We have set up fedora-education-list to discuss LTSP possibilities, and those who are interested in a Fedora Music SIG should contact Greg DeKoenigsberg.

6. Integrating sub-projects -- How do we make sure the Board is attaining its goals for overseeing Fedora? DECIDED: Get a list of each sub-project's PMC. Get a weekly status report from each PMC. Get someone willing to do a roll-up of each status on a regular basis. The Board will also produce a report for this purpose to increase transparency and accountability. The Board needs to assign an owner for this task.

7. "Opening Core" -- This goal has buy-in from high management at Red Hat. Communication internally at Red Hat (Release Engineering) is vital to this process. Need a short term (pre RHEL5) and longer term (post RHEL5) plan. MaxSpevack is leading this, with the help of ElliotLee and WarrenTogami.