Reently there have been intense discussions between developers of my favorite Linux distro, Gentoo. They are complaining about the lack of directions and about where Gentoo is supposed to go. Developers seem to be leaving the project in droves as jugded from the announcements on their planet. Here is my completely unimportant opinion:
Solutions to your problems do not require the creation of ever more councils, relationship boards, or committees. If I want to hear political or philosophical discussions I’ll join a political party or the University debate club, thank you. This is a freaking Linux distro, whose mission it is to “be as close to upstream as possible”.
So what is your task then? Provide a nice package manager, bump all upstream packages to their latest version as quickly as possible and make sure they interoperate nicely. Dot. That’s it.
Personally, I think that is direction enough. Now that might seem a bit boring to some developers, but your mission is both a blessing and a curse: It makes a great distro, but basically all you have to do is providing package management and bump versions (Yes, I do know this is a bit simplified and that e.g. the toolchain guys need to modify a lot to make things work together).