Well, that’s why one of the proposals is a limit on consecutive terms, not a term limit period. This should improve varied membership, but wouldn’t create a need for a constantly replenishing number of potential candidates.
But will that serve to get new members into FESCo, or will it effectively make FESCo a slightly larger group of on again / off again members?
yes. this.
One thing, you’ll want to consider phasing in the “skip term”, over a transitional period to make sure you don’t drop too large a group in the first election where its in use. This is a transitional concern. Please consider scoping to “at most X number of people with the longest consecutive tenure.” This should help space out turnover over several elections during the transition. Something like X=2 or 3 might help smooth out the transition over a couple of years. You want to avoid all the initial term limits firing in the first election and dropping the majority of the members. You want to get something that looks sustainable and not something that looks bursty.
Story time,
My 120 year old curling club in Alaska implemented the “skip term” model for its board of directors at some point before I showed up. We could sit on the board for 2 consecutive terms (6 years consecutive) but then we had to sit out a term. It was useful in three ways:
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it created a space for younger club members to step up.
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it helped generational knowledge transfer, members who rolled off the board became an emeritus resource for new board members in a graceful manner, without feeling like they “lost” the trust of the membership via an election loss.
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the term off let the emeritus person re-engage as a veteran volunteer in a different way using their existing volunteer time budget.
-jef"I keep threatening people that I will do a talk about how curling is similar to open source"spaleta
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I’m going to get meta for a moment, because I’d like to observe that it is common for discussions about different approaches to solving a problem to result in disagreement because they are, indirectly, discussions about different problems or different goals. I think this is such a discussion.
Ticket 3507 suggests that taking steps to get new members into FESCo is a goal, and further suggests a technical / process change that might achieve that goal.
I think that Neal and I agree with the goal (Neal, please correct me if I’m wrong!). But Neal has pointed out several times that we should try to understand why project members rarely run for FESCo for the first time, which is a good point. My concern is that reserved seats are too easily abused by people who will put their own interests above the interests of the project, especially if we don’t answer Neal’s question about what keeps people from running for the first time. That’s why I’ve suggested a social solution rather than a technical solution.
The term limit counter-proposal, however, rejects both the original solution and the original goal. Rejection of the goal is mostly indirect, but if term limits would “improve varied membership, but wouldn’t create a need for a constantly replenishing number of potential candidates,” I think that’s clearly a different goal.
So as I see the situation currently, there are actually two discussions and choices in progress: The first is whether we want to try to encourage project members who have not served on FESCo to run, or whether we simply want more varied membership without explicitly trying to get new project members involved. The second choice is whether or not we are willing to invest in building the community, if we decide that new project members on FESCo is desirable.
I think being explicit about that might help move the discussion forward.
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Thanks for spelling that out Gordon, I had similar thoughts but hadn’t had time to write them up yet. 
I think there’s perhaps another goal (or just overlap with the first one) to try and ‘train up a next generation of fesco members’. Which I also think is a great goal, but I think a good fesco member is someone who has a lot of knowledge of at least some areas of the distribution and how things fit so they can make informed decisions. That sort of background takes time and desire to work on something / learn about areas and would be hard to mentor directly.
As to figuring out why new folks don’t run, perhaps we could ask in the next survey we do? But I think it’s going to be a combo of:
- I don’t think I have the background to do it (yet?)
- I think the people doing it now are doing fine
- I don’t have the time
- etc
two other ideas that have occurred to me:
- If we want to change up the composition of fesco, could we perhaps be more active at lobbying voters? ie, blog posts/discussions/list posts/endorsements where we ask voters to vote for candidates that would ‘mix things up’.
- If we want to get more people more involved in things, we did long ago have a group of people who would help fesco with various things. ie, form a subcomittee on a particular topic (like FPC) and have folks contribute there until they are ready to run for fesco. Not sure there’s too much interest in that however.
Anyhow, I have no great answers here, but will keep following and pondering.
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I think maybe the word “mentor” has a connotation for some people that it doesn’t have for me, so I’ll try to rephrase what I propose:
I think there are probably members of the Fedora project who have all of the technical background, and sufficient understanding of how the project works, to reasonably expect to make useful contributions as a member of FESCo, but who don’t run for reasons that we don’t yet understand. One of those reasons might be simply that they have no exposure to the process and don’t understand what is required.
We might be able to encourage those people to participate if we told them how to observe (and possibly assist) the work of the committee (or the work of a single member), and if they knew that an elected member would take the time to answer their questions about the position, the intent behind the project structure, the process philosophy, etc.
I don’t want to pretend that is free. It’s work. But if this seems like it would be too hard, then I think I’m probably not being very clear in what I’m suggesting.
two other ideas that have occurred to me:
I think those are both great ideas, too!
Thanks, Kevin.
Ah yes, I see what you mean, and I agree with you there.
There are probibly some people who could be encouraged…
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I guess I’ll answer the apt question Neal originally posed in https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/3507#comment-993977:
But I think the first thing we should do is ask the community why they don’t step up in the first place. We’re making a lot of assumptions here.
The main reason I haven’t run this year is due to $LACK_OF_TIME, and I think the current experienced FESCo members do a good job and mostly share the same ultimate vision as I. I do subscribe to the FESCo tracker, as I like to keep up to date on what’s going on and what decisions are made (and obviously when I have my own proposal that FESCo is considering).
But then I look at the current role of FESCo and feel more pessimistic about joining.
A lot of Changes are just Update <software> to <version> and mostly get rubber stamped.
Then, every so often when there’s a major or controversial Change proposed, the entire thing blows up. There’s a huge discussion split between the mailing list and the forums that feels impossible to follow, and many of the comments are repetitive or attacks on the people actually doing the work and trying to make the distribution better or otherwise unproductive. Some of this is from downstream users who don’t use the Fedora distribution directly or have never contributed to Fedora in any way or just came from links on Youtube or Reddit or elsewhere and don’t seem interested in participating in a constructive discussion. Even if I ultimately don’t support a Change, I don’t know that I would have the mental energy to trudge through all those negative comments or try to moderate the forum as a FESCO member.
There’s other things like the Forge change or the broken security bugs process that I do care a lot about where many of the engineering decisions seem to be made by Red Hat teams behind closed doors and where the Engineering Steering Committee and the community at large does not have much ability to effectuate change over. I’m not saying that FESCo needs to decide the exact hex color code for each element in the Fedora Forge custom theme or whatever, but it’d be nice if larger engineering decisions were made in collaboration with the community or at least the FESCo representatives that we elected.
I’d rather collaborate in my spare time in SIGs and on package maintenance with other passionate people who share the same goals and work on my other efforts to clean up the distribution and package ownership and chime in on project discussions when I have something productive to add.
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I’ve been trying to formulate something to this effect, but have not come up with anything yet that can be properly justified and not seem arbitrary.
The talk about making sure FESCo is representative makes me think though … perhaps every election cycle FESCo can decide among themselves which area of Fedora it currently lacks expertise in, and issue a public call for participation asking for volunteers with expertise in that area to run?
When I stepped down from EPSCo it was after knowing someone competent with more time to dedicate to it is planning to run, so maybe rather than enforcing that some FESCo members must step down, or tweaking the election rules to try and favor newcomers, we can do it in this more targeted way.