Hi all. I'm a relative newcomer here and came to take-up the Fedora Jam
project. I've been following this discussion very closely, and I've got to
say, that I'm quite disappointed at the way this has been handled.
I'm not a software engineer by trade. I'm an audio engineer with 26 years of
experience and a degree in leadership. That leadership degree is the hat that
I want to chime-in with here, and the lens through which I'm viewing this.
On Thursday, April 2, 2020 4:25:53 PM PDT Jeremy Cline wrote:
On Thu, 2020-04-02 at 11:52 +0100, Leigh Griffin wrote:
>
> The number of active developers on Fedora initiatives has gone up
> drastically since I joined the team in 2019. You are possibly not
> seeing that as the team have moved from a model of siloed work on
> multiple apps, swimming against the tid working 16 hour days, to
> working on team oriented initiatives to add real value to the
> ecosystem. So the noise of working on multiple small things at once
> is not as loud as it was in 2018 which is giving that illusion.
I'd always suspected my work added no real value, but never had the
proof. I appreciate the validation 🙂.
Jeremy's comment here struck me to the core. If anybody on any team that I had
led had mentioned this, I'd be broken-hearted. This is the sign of a complete
failure at the leadership level. No volunteer or employee should *ever* be
made to feel this way. Full stop. I have the feeling that Neal is feeling the
same way. All of that hard work these people have done is being thrown away in
their faces, and they have nothing to say about it. That is a complete
leadership failure.
It is apparent in this discussion that the CPE (and especially Leigh) has
failed in a leadership role. It's very possible that the Fedora Council has
failed too for allowing this situation to happen. I don't care about the
technical merits, I simply care about how this is being handled and how people
are being treated in having their voices taken away from them. I think this
goes against the whole "Friends" foundation.
The root of this leadership failure seems to be that the discussion happened
mostly behind closed doors without any announcement *to this list* that this
was being discussed. Transparency is *key* in leadership.
Honestly, this is making me, someone who came to this project only two months
ago, wonder if it was, indeed, the right choice. I hope I'm not made to feel
the same way as Jeremy, and I certainly hope I never make anyone I lead feel
that way.
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Erich Eickmeyer
Fedora Jam