State of the Fedora Board

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.