Board term limits

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 08:52:08AM -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> During the discussion following the Board election, the subject of term
> limits was raised. Generally those who commented on term limits thought
> they were a good idea, including several Board members. I've written up
> a proposal to amend the Board's succession plan with term limits, in the
> hopes that these limits would encourage continual but gentle change in
> the Board's elected membership over time.
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pfrields/Proposal_for_Board_Term_Limits
>
> Comments appreciated either here or in the discussion page for the
> proposal on the wiki. I'll bring this before the Board for final
> discussion and a vote at our August 5th session, which will likely be a
> public IRC meeting.

I'll throw in my bits here. I'm generally opposed to term limits,
preferring elections to serve that purpose.

By my count [1], we have had 21 different people serve on the Board since
its inception 2 years ago, with a broad range of experiences and
interests being represented. 11 different people have held Elected
seats during that time, and 4 of the elected seats have almost always
had turnover (one could argue Jeff being re-elected he changed seats
but remained; that doesn't really change the argument much.) Each
seat is elected to a 1-year term, enough time to make a difference,
but not so long as to build an incumbancy so strong an election could
not easily displace.

The goal of term limits is to get fresh faces, fresh ideas, and broad
project representation. I think we're doing a fine job of that as-is
personally.

Personally, I've been fortunate to have been re-elected once. I have
very much enjoyed being a part of the Board, and hope I have been able
to contribute in measure worthy of having held a seat thus far. If
Paul were to ask me to step aside, I of course would oblige.

I suspect term limits is a cure for a problem we do not (yet) have,
and should that problem truly arise, I have confidence in the Chair to
take steps necessary to address, without adding rules apriori.

Thanks,
Matt

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/History. Thanks to whomever
has kept that page up-to-date.

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On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 9:24 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 08:55 -0700, Luis Villa wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 5:52 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > During the discussion following the Board election, the subject of term
>> > limits was raised. Generally those who commented on term limits thought
>> > they were a good idea, including several Board members. I've written up
>> > a proposal to amend the Board's succession plan with term limits, in the
>> > hopes that these limits would encourage continual but gentle change in
>> > the Board's elected membership over time.
>> >
>> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pfrields/Proposal_for_Board_Term_Limits
>> >
>> > Comments appreciated either here or in the discussion page for the
>> > proposal on the wiki. I'll bring this before the Board for final
>> > discussion and a vote at our August 5th session, which will likely be a
>> > public IRC meeting.
>>
>> This may well reflect my position as an entrenched incumbent but a
>> little more explanation of what problem this solves would be good.
>> Incumbents may have a lot of valuable institutional memory, so making
>> them step away on a schedule might not be ideal. If you're concerned
>> about people overstaying their welcome and getting new blood on board,
>> it might be better to focus on how to get new blood involved and
>> increase the new blood's profile, and how to measure involvement of
>> incumbents (possibly privately) so that they get the message that they
>> are fading and ought to formalize that by fading out completely.
>>
>> You mention Notting's wisdom in this sense, which reminds me that
>> getting rid of institutional knowledge is particularly problematic
>> given the elected/appointed split- if this actually applies only to
>> elected members, you're automatically putting the elected members at
>> an institutional memory disadvantage relative to the appointed
>> members.
>
> The problem at hand was the perceived dominance by full-time Fedora
> people on the Board. People who spend their entire $DAYJOB as well as
> their spare time on Fedora are automatically very involved and visible.
> That can translate directly to votes on the basis of name recognition,
> which really disadvantages people who are very involved, but in a
> somewhat more limited fashion because they don't have the luxury of
> doing Fedora all day every day. (Maybe a similar advantage would go to
> someone unemployed, but let's not argue that for right now.) ;-)

It seems to me that a term limit would just get a different set of
full-timers on the board. If full-timers are the problem (and I agree
that they might be) you might consider instead a cap on the number of
people who work on fedora full time. The GNOME Board does something
similar (no more than 40% of seats be held by any one company) and it
seems to work pretty well for us.

> Having said that, I like your thinking about making sure that incumbents
> are involved. I've been very much a proponent of getting people on the
> Board to pick up action items and push them to completion. Again, that
> should be independent of $DAYJOB -- people who are volunteer Board
> members are equally expected to carry some of this load by dint of their
> elected position.
>
> I'm not sure how to measure that directly other than through tracking of
> our agenda, maintaining a clear list of action items and the accountable
> parties for them, and setting deadlines for their completion. Those
> lists are provided to the community through this mailing list and
> elsewhere, so any contributor should feel free to hold members' feet to
> the fire as needed. I do believe that people who don't have the time or
> energy to see self-assignments through will generally gravitate away
> from the re-election process.

We've been experimenting with using Tracks to track board tasks; I'm
not sure it is ideal, but something to think about. Just publishing
meeting attendance records before each election would have been
helpful for us in the past as well.

Luis

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On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Matt Domsch wrote:

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/History. Thanks to whomever
has kept that page up-to-date.


That was me. No problem! I thought it would be good to have a history
of who filled what seat, when.


--Max

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Luis Villa wrote:

It seems to me that a term limit would just get a different set of
full-timers on the board. If full-timers are the problem (and I agree
that they might be) you might consider instead a cap on the number of
people who work on fedora full time. The GNOME Board does something
similar (no more than 40% of seats be held by any one company) and it
seems to work pretty well for us.


In the event that more than 40% of the Board's elected membership is
from one company, how do you bring it down to 40%?


My big concern is that there are many parts of Red Hat which have
legitimate reasons to want to have some board membership, and having the
full-timers who are most in the public eye get the popularity vote is
pretty unfair to people from the RHEL, JBoss, etc. groups who may wish
to participate.


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Paul W. Frields wrote:

The problem at hand was the perceived dominance by full-time Fedora
people on the Board. People who spend their entire $DAYJOB as well as
their spare time on Fedora are automatically very involved and visible.
That can translate directly to votes on the basis of name recognition,
which really disadvantages people who are very involved, but in a
somewhat more limited fashion because they don't have the luxury of
doing Fedora all day every day. (Maybe a similar advantage would go to
someone unemployed, but let's not argue that for right now.) ;-)

As a secondary note, the people who do spend their entire $DAYJOB on
Fedora are extremely likely to be Red Hat folks. In an average election
then, we generate the *perception* that Red Hat is still stacking the
Board. The idea of term limits came up as a way to limit the effects of
$DAYJOB on this process to some extent, while not shutting people from
Red Hat out based on their $DAYJOB, either.


I think there's a big distinction between RHT employees paid to work on
Fedora full time and RHT employees who aren't. Perhaps a better way to
solve this problem would be to limit the number of concurrently serving
people from a given business unit within RHT. And possibly move to an
internal election rather than seemingly random appointments.


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On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 5:09 PM, Christopher Aillon <caillon@redhat.com> wrote:
> Luis Villa wrote:
>>
>> It seems to me that a term limit would just get a different set of
>> full-timers on the board. If full-timers are the problem (and I agree
>> that they might be) you might consider instead a cap on the number of
>> people who work on fedora full time. The GNOME Board does something
>> similar (no more than 40% of seats be held by any one company) and it
>> seems to work pretty well for us.
>
> In the event that more than 40% of the Board's elected membership is from
> one company, how do you bring it down to 40%?

If X people from the company can be on the board, and X+N are elected,
then the first X people from the company and the next N votegetters
(who would not otherwise have been elected) are put on the board. I'm
admittedly not sure how this would work with the staggered Fedora
board.

> My big concern is that there are many parts of Red Hat which have legitimate
> reasons to want to have some board membership, and having the full-timers
> who are most in the public eye get the popularity vote is pretty unfair to
> people from the RHEL, JBoss, etc. groups who may wish to participate.

Well, right. I think you're definitely better off resolving the
problem by making it easier for non-fulltimers/non-RHers to be on the
board, instead of making it harder for those people to stay on. But if
you have to choose the latter, I'm just suggesting a different way to
do it.

Luis

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On Thu, 2008-07-24 at 20:22 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > The problem at hand was the perceived dominance by full-time Fedora
> > people on the Board. People who spend their entire $DAYJOB as well as
> > their spare time on Fedora are automatically very involved and visible.
> > That can translate directly to votes on the basis of name recognition,
> > which really disadvantages people who are very involved, but in a
> > somewhat more limited fashion because they don't have the luxury of
> > doing Fedora all day every day. (Maybe a similar advantage would go to
> > someone unemployed, but let's not argue that for right now.) ;-)
> >
> > As a secondary note, the people who do spend their entire $DAYJOB on
> > Fedora are extremely likely to be Red Hat folks. In an average election
> > then, we generate the *perception* that Red Hat is still stacking the
> > Board. The idea of term limits came up as a way to limit the effects of
> > $DAYJOB on this process to some extent, while not shutting people from
> > Red Hat out based on their $DAYJOB, either.
>
> I think there's a big distinction between RHT employees paid to work on
> Fedora full time and RHT employees who aren't. Perhaps a better way to
> solve this problem would be to limit the number of concurrently serving
> people from a given business unit within RHT. And possibly move to an
> internal election rather than seemingly random appointments.

It would be great if someone would actually put up a counter-proposal on
my (or another) wiki page.

--
Paul W. Frields
gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
http://paul.frields.org/ - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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On Thu, 2008-07-24 at 21:41 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:

> It would be great if someone would actually put up a counter-proposal on
> my (or another) wiki page.

Well, you could harness the power of vote-against. Basically you would
need to get to a point where you would have a greater number of board
members who have fulfilled their elected mandates (two releases or
whatever) and then ask the voters to vote N fresh faces in and vote
another N old farts out (board members that have fulfilled their
mandates). Count the votes, curse democracy, and you have something that
looks like it's appealing a bit more to "people's will" than "term
limits". If you impose a restriction that old farts can not run for
reelection without sitting a release out, you will be guaranteed some
turnover, with the survivors basically living on borrowed time unless
they're willing to sit one release cycle out and qualify to run for
election for another full term.

Cristian
--
Cristian Gafton


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On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 00:20 -0700, Luis Villa wrote:

> It seems to me that a term limit would just get a different set of
> full-timers on the board. If full-timers are the problem (and I agree
> that they might be) you might consider instead a cap on the number of
> people who work on fedora full time. The GNOME Board does something
> similar (no more than 40% of seats be held by any one company) and it
> seems to work pretty well for us.

I came in to this somewhat ambiguous, thinking that term limits made
some amount of sense. So, I've been swayed by the various concerns and
definitely think the idea needs lots more consideration before adoption.

So far, the idea of limiting the company representation on the Board
makes the most sense as a preemptive strike against evil corporate
dealings and ill-thought reasoning about the Board's make-up.

- Karsten
--
Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr.
Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com
Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
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