Well, as you know, I ran for the Fedora board and was not elected. That's OK, I didn't really expect to be, and I'm quite happy with the results of the election and the state of the Board. However, the results and the ending composition of the Board has sparked a great thread on fedora-advisory-board that I felt obliged to respond to. As some of you know, I broke my arm immediately before Summit/FUDCon (and went anyway), so my pace of blogging/replying to e-mail has been a little less than what it perhaps should be in these circumstances. I'm going to try and make that up here, responding to some of the topics that have been brought up.
1. Request for voter representation by employer statistics
I think that this is utter hogwash, wanting to know how many votes were @redhat.com vs. those that weren't. To me, there really is no distinction. Take folks like Jesse Keating, Mike McGrath, or Seth Vidal for example (two of whom were elected to the Board this cycle). Red Hat hired those people, FROM THE COMMUNITY, in order to enable them to do more great work on Fedora - not to further some corporate interest. There are also people that Red Hat hired long before Fedora existed - take Tom Callaway. He's been a Red Hat employee since the dark ages I think, but I don't view him as any less of a community member or leader than Jesse, Mike, Seth, or anyone else. We also have community leaders such as Máirín Duffy, who leads the art team. She also happens to work for Red Hat, however, Fedora is not her primary responsibility - she works on the RHN Satellite team. Is she less of a community member or leader than anyone else? I don't think so.
2. Red Hat's commitment to the community
I don't see anything in Fedora right now that in any way brings into question Red Hat's commitment to the community in my mind. They just paid a rather large amount of money (and do so every ~6 months) to put on FUDCon, for example. There's nothing that states that as a requirement, in fact, I'd be willing to venture that it was a pretty hard sell inside of Red Hat to start doing these.
3. Voter Turnout
I have to agree that with a turnout of 250 out of 4069 possible voters, that there is something broken with this system. If you are reading this and did not vote, I'd really like to know why not. If you do not understand the importance of what the Fedora Board does, it's not a bunch of guys in suits that gather in a room and smoke cigars, it's a REAL, ACTUAL decision making body that has been empowered to decide the future of Fedora in various ways. Even though most of the Board's meetings and communication happen behind closed doors, there's no secret about what the board does, generally (except when it comes to matters that they can't discuss - legal matters for instance). I don't think that the lack of turnout (at least to this degree) expresses that the community is content with the status quo. I believe that we are missing large segments of the community in the electorate, and need to find a way to reach out to them and encourage them to vote.
I think that's all I have to say for now. I am going to continue with what I ran for the Board on (the recruitment and retention of non-traditional contributors to Fedora). I'm going to need all the help that I can in finding these folks, though :).
Congrats to those who are on the Board, I know that you will serve us well. To Dennis, Josh, and JonRob, everything that you do for Fedora is appreciated, and you are no less leaders in this community than you were before these elections.
Friday, June 27, 2008
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3 comments:
You asked why people did not vote.
I voted, but, to be honest, only out of a sense of obligation. If I recall correctly, I ranked all of the candidates within a point or so. Not because I didn't care about the results, but because all of the candidates were so full of awesome. Some of them I know very well, I know about their contributions to the community, and all of the awesome work they've already done. Others I didn't know as well, but also had a clear track record within the community, and may have brought fresh new ideas and perspectives to the board. Here in the US, we're used to elections where we have to pick the lesser of two (or more) evils. In this case, I was faced with the choice of too many great candidates. Should I pick the person whose track record I am very familiar with over the person who might have fresh energy and ideas? Or the new person, and risk giving the proven leader the feeling that his work wasn't appreciated?
Jon, that's a blog post from you with the purpose of causing a great stir instead of being helpful.
I back up Jeff's interest in the statistics on voter distribution. Not for lame conspiracy theories that have popped out of your head, but with the hope of getting some input while trying to understand the low voter turnout.
Your thoughts and the way you express yourself in a blog (instead of a more suitable medium like fab-list) are harmful, especially because you've been a FPB candidate. You've misunderstood a lot of the thread you refer to. There are people who are tired of inflammatory "Red Hat vs. the community" topics, which are started with no reason or as a result of poor misunderstandings when meeting people with frayed nerves. As why you've come up with a blog post like this is beyond my comprehension.
Michael -
This was not intended to be inciteful nor to create a stir - if it has, I've failed. The choice of medium was intentional - to get my thoughts out there, without creating much of a stir beyond what had already been created. I think that I pretty clearly expressed that there is no "Red Hat v. Non Red Hat" sentiment here - at least that was the point. I'll leave this at this, though - as not to create a stir :)
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