On Thu, 11 Feb 2021 at 11:29, Neal Gompa <ngompa13@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 11:02 AM Peter Boy <pboy@uni-bremen.de> wrote:
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> Folks, we have now spent some time housekeeping and organization, so far without viable result. The only solution I see is a restart with the help of FESCo and/or Council.
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> We have 2 organisational units: the SIG and the WG. There are 33 names listed on the SIG page, of which only 2 have "reappeared" after the reboot (Matthew and Stephen Smoogen). The last activity was 6 (!) years ago. The current WG lists 8 names, of which 4 are fortunately still highly active. But 50% are inactive at this difficult stage of the reboot.
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> There is no rule about leaving members or inactive members by voting or WG decision. The only possibility is a decision by FESCo / Council.
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> At the same time, we need to rethink the relationship between SIG and WG. I quote Stephen Smoogen:
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> „I think a lot of people applying think that a working group is similar to SIG membership. I made that mistake when I first tried to join when the Server Working Group was formed.
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> Being a member of a working group is basically a commitment for N hours a week to do whatever is needed for the group to get an edition out the door. It may be writing tests for QA, it may be writing documentation, it may be sitting in multiple meetings in a week to reach a consensus on what is getting done in this edition, and it may be coming in every morning and finding out why a server compose broke (versus others) and see which commit did it. It is called a 'working' group for that reason.“
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> Looking at the list of people interested in the Server WG, I reckon we are not in the happy situation that 19 people want to (and can) make a "commitment for N hours a week to do whatever is needed".
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> That considered, it is probably to be preferred to focus more on the SIG. That's the place where discussion and innovation take place. The first thing we have to do is rebuild the SIG.
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> The Working Group is a special arrangement, according to https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Leadership#Working_Groups a subcommittee of FESCo or Council, requires formal membership and active contributions, and is a requirement for Editions.
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> Please remember: According to our rules (Government Charter), Working Group membership is not a prerequisite for participation in voting and decision-making! Regularly, all (SIG) participants are involved! We are community based. In case of doubt, members of the Working Group are the ones who have to ensure implementation if no one else can do it (or may veto if implementation is not feasible).
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> Therefore, FESCo / Council should decide / approve
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> (a) Rebuild Server SIG and gather all interested parties and activists there (see list at the end), as a replacement for the current long list.
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> (b) Rebuild the Working Group approving the current active members (see list at the end) and if considered useful, additional active participants for specific tasks.
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> (c) Consider to add a section to the Governance Charter alike „A Working Group member is expected to provide regular and continuous work on one or more of the different work areas as required to keep Fedora Server running. Membership begins on the day of election and lasts for 2 years. The first period ends at the end of the second following year. It is automatically renewed if the member commits to a further period. Renewal is possible as often as desired.“
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> Looking over the discussion since November last year, I think we have 2 particular areas of focus for the coming months (in addition to the ongoing work on releases and bug fixing):
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> (a) Building up a new documentation
> (b) Establishing a cooperation with Cloud Images
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> and ultimately probably also
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> (c) Organisation and Community building
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> For these areas we would need to find someone who commits to "… N hours a week to do whatever is needed…" and "...sitting in multiple meetings in a week to reach a consensus..." (Stephen Smoogen).
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Not being a WG would be a serious blow to the Server Edition,

I think the issue is that we have neither a working Working Group or a working SIG to make the Working Group possible. A lot of people have just used the Server spin as a replacement for the old Everything spin so that they could avoid being 'dictated by the Workstation group' (as said by several over the years). But a Working Group needs to be more than 'it's not Workstation' and it needs to have people who have a) time to devote to it and b) a genuine interest in making a Server spin.
 
At this point we need to get our houses in order and the SIG is where that happens. We can try to do both, but most people don't have your 'over 9000' energy levels to do both the SIG and WG setup. We do need to make the governance of the WG more light weight and more in line with the Workstation and probably IOT WG items. However, that needs people who are able to focus on doing that. What we have instead are 34+ volunteers who may be able to help, may not, may want something completely different, etc. We need to get that cleared up before we can do the adjustments to the charter.

[And man I have now put more energy into this than I expected I would.. so it is clear I have some passion towards this.]

--
Stephen J Smoogen.