[CentOS] Community voice (was [CentOS-announce] Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1503 ) on x86_64)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
> Behalf Of Karanbir Singh
> Sent: 03 April 2015 01:00
> To: centos at centos.org
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] [CentOS-announce] Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1503 ) on
> x86_64
> 
> On 02/04/15 21:35, Phelps, Matthew wrote:
> 
> > See my reply earlier. The description of the centos-devel list says
> > "this is strictly about development."
> 
> 
> Matt, come join the contributor base - be a commnuity communication liason (
> or, I am sure we can find a title to quantify this ).
> 
> stretching this a bit futher : lets see if we can find 10 people who might be
> considered 'community beacons', who could / would act as commnuity comms
> and liason to make sure we are driving in the right directions and communicating
> things in the most impactful manner.
> 
> I am willing to lobby the board to then allow this group to spectate and
> feedback into Board Meetings ( we meet once a month ).
> 

Limiting the influence of the community to spectate and feedback seems less than I would expect. If community involvement in governance is to be improved, it needs to be seen to make a difference. OpenStack has ambassadors (https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Community/AmbassadorProgram) and elections to the 1/3 of the board from the community. This is probably too heavy for CentOS but some form of community representation with a genuine voice in governance would seem reasonable for an open source project.

However, with the board rules as defined in http://www.centos.org/about/governance/joining-the-project/, it is difficult for someone who is a user of CentOS as opposed to a developer to meet the merit criteria. The current CentOS board membership would benefit from more diversity and different outlooks to help identify changes which need further community input such as this one.

> One data point I want to drop in here is that less than 0.1 % of the CentOS user
> base has any contact with the project ( wherein I imply, lists + forums + irc +
> bugs + wiki ), so we might need to spread the net wide to find a reasonable
> representation.
> 
> thoughts ?
> 

The challenge here is to find the appropriate people to help since many will be paid for delivering value to their companies rather than being paid to work on CentOS. Given their limited time, I do not feel that requiring operators to follow a development list is the right solution to encourage more interaction. 

Tim

> 
> --
> Karanbir Singh
> +44-207-0999389 | http://www.karan.org/ | twitter.com/kbsingh
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