#1355 Please select Engineering Representative for the new Fedora Council
Closed None Opened 9 years ago by mattdm.

The new Fedora Council is underway! The plan calls for FESCo, as a key elected governance body, to select an '''Engineering Representative''' to cover the broad area of engineering, covering development, packaging, QA, release engineering, infrastructure, and so on.

From the document:

"Engineering" and "Outreach" are broad areas roughly encompassing two of
the major areas of activity in Fedora. Engineering is the technical work
related to building and releasing the Fedora operating system and the
infrastructure related to that. Outreach includes marketing, support, and
Fedora Ambassadors — largely activities that happen between Fedora and the
world at large, with the distribution release cycle serving as a fuel
source, not the thing that's being worked on.

The engineering and outreach representatives' responsibility is to
represent their areas collectively, not to be just an individual voice that
happens to be voted-in by some subset of Fedora. They are selected by the
people active in those areas, coordinated by the Fedora Engineering Steering
Committee (FESCo) and the Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee (FAmSCo)
respectively, and serve for terms to be determined by those committees.

This isn't a small job, and the ideal representative will generally have several hours a week to contribute (although hopefully much of that will mesh with current contributions), and be able to respond within a relatively short time at least with a "hold on — I need more input on this one".

The structure leaves the method of selection, tenure, etc. up to FESCo; the intention is for it to be meritocratic. Other seats are selected by general election, and I expect that to conclude in about a month, and it would be ideal for this selection to be made by that point if not sooner.


adding meeting keyword

No suggestions thus far. Are people expecting self-nominations here? Kind of curious what people's thoughts are before we get into the meeting so we don't spend an hour just randomly discussing things.

I was kind of expecting there to be a little more response on the devel list. I sent it to devel-announce and referenced it on several other lists. There's only response so far (see the thread at https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-October/203266.html), and that's number80 mentioning that he has some nominations in mind but was waiting to speak to those people before saying anything.

I think that people didn't get that they had their say (either nominate someone, or suggest a process).
People are also still cautious about the council. :(

At the moment, most people I contacted declined ...

So, I guess at this point what we should do is set up a structure:

  1. Do we want nominations?
  2. Self-nominations, or others?
  3. Timeframe for nomination?
  4. Timeframe for decision?

Looks like we are going to go with:

  • 1 week nomination period

  • FESCo selects someone from the nominees

  • They serve until they wish to step down or FESCo wants to replace them.

jwb is going to write up this policy and we will look at ratifying it next week.

In the mean time we want to open the nominations period now. Dgilmore will be sending an announcement about that.

I nominate Josh Boyer as a candidate with his agreement (Cf. devel@ list)

I'd like to nominate myself, Josef Bacik, for the position. As a side note maybe there should be some questions that nominees should answer or something, feels weird just throwing your name into a ring and hoping people know what your qualifications are.

I'm a maintainer of btrfs, I've been involved in Fedora for years. My involvement has dropped in recent years but I've always kept up with what is going on from a engineering standpoint. I have worked with people across the various groups outside of the kernel, from systemd to anaconda.

Hi Josef. For this particular seat, the basic idea is that we're looking for someone who is a currently active and very visible in the engineering side of Fedora right now. I definitely appreciate your interest and enthusiasm, though, and I promise we'll take all nominations seriously.

Taking off my FESCo hat and putting on my Board, hat: For the two generally-elected positions, we are going to do interview questions and provide a sort of "campaign period".

Matt, sounds reasonable, I for sure don't fit the "very visible" part anymore. If I had noticed that Josh had been nominated before I wouldn't have bothered self nominating, I'd vote for that guy.

Replying to [comment:6 kevin]:

Looks like we are going to go with:

  • 1 week nomination period

  • FESCo selects someone from the nominees

  • They serve until they wish to step down or FESCo wants to replace them.

jwb is going to write up this policy and we will look at ratifying it next week.

I've not forgotten about this, I just had some things come up. I'll try to get it drafted first thing in the morning.

Replying to [comment:14 jwboyer]:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Jwboyer/Fedora_Council_Engineering_Rep

Here's the first draft. Questions/comments more than welcome.

Looks good to me. I went ahead and made some trivial wording changes.

I like the fallback plan, but have a question. In that case, "the role will rotate among existing FESCo members"; what is the period of this rotation?

Replying to [comment:15 mattdm]:

Replying to [comment:14 jwboyer]:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Jwboyer/Fedora_Council_Engineering_Rep

Here's the first draft. Questions/comments more than welcome.

Looks good to me. I went ahead and made some trivial wording changes.

I like the fallback plan, but have a question. In that case, "the role will rotate among existing FESCo members"; what is the period of this rotation?

You mean while FESCo members are filling the seat in the interim? I left that out intentionally because I hope we never get to that point. Weekly is too frequent. Monthly might work. I'm open to suggestions.

I hope so too. I do really like the idea of making it FESCo's problem rather than asking the Council to figure it out. :)

Monthly seems good enough; too short and it's all absorbed by spin-up time and there's not enough continuity to handle bigger goings-on, and too long, of course, becomes "why not just be the rep?".

From the meeting yesterday

  • AGREED: fedora council engineering representative draft is accepted as official fesco policy (+6/0/-0)
  • AGREED: FESCo selects Josh Boyer (jwb) as Engineering Representative for Fedora Council (+6,-0, 1)

(Not surprisingly, Josh was the abstention.)

Congratulations Josh!

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