How the Council Works
On Tuesday 4th February 2025, members of the Fedora Council met to begin four days of in person meetings. The first topic on the agenda was to discuss how the council works. We opened with a question - What should a good council do and be? Using this question, we dove into what we felt the current council was doing that fulfilled this statement, and what we need to be doing better. There was more discussion on the latter 
Our main pain points were that there is a lack of clarity on what is expected of an elected representative, a âfuzzinessâ on what the Fedora Council is responsible for in general, and a need to create more awareness and a collaboration between governance groups in the project.
We started with addressing the elected representative role. Our documentation covers a definition, but during this discussion, we decided that we needed to be more specific. And realistic. We are going to update our documentation to explicitly state that being a voice of the community is a sufficient contribution to an elected representativeâs work on the council. The people who fill these seats are elected by our community, and it is enough to expect them to give a community perspective and voice to decisions the council makes. We are removing the expectation that an elected member will also pursue a goal they want to bring to Fedora while on the council, and instead replace it with encouragement, but ultimately a choice, to take part in other goals of the project such as being an executive sponsor of an initiative while serving on the council.
The responsibilities of the council itself can sometimes be hard to describe succinctly. A lot of the time, the council is only most visible when there is a big impact in the project, and we are reacting to this as a leadership body. We want the Council to be defined as the executive part of the project, but right now the biggest issue with that for the Fedora Council is that to be that, âday-to-dayâ work of an executive body is sometimes invisible and non-existent. That doesnât work in Fedora. We want to be visible and open and engaged in our communityâs work, and so we looked at how we can become a stronger executive body. Firstly, I had to check the definition of executive It is defined as (adjective) âhaving the power to put plans or actions into effectâ. That definition fits using our initiative process perfectly to execute on our 2028 Strategy, New problem - that process really needs some improvements to make it more appealing and successful. To start the improvements to the initiative process, the council needs to be more proactive in each initiative we approve, and in more practical ways. Weâre starting expanding the Executive Sponsor role to offer more program management support to the initiative such as regular checkins, helping defining milestones and providing status reporting to the council and the project on a more regular basis. The council can and will provide more opportunities to showcase the initiativeâs work by posting about it in blogs and magazines, creating opportunities at release parties and council video meetings and generally giving more advocacy to initiatives the Fedora Council is supporting. And, we are going to try to simplify the proposal process so it is easier to follow, with clear requirements on what a proposal needs to have and do before it can be submitted as a formal request. The Edition Status promotion is a great example of the framework we would like to replicate for the initiative proposal process.
Finally, to improve collaboration and build more awareness between the Council and other governance groups in Fedora, we came up with an idea to have a monthly report between FESCo, Council and Mindshare. We are going to propose to FESCo and Mindshare that we collaborate on a monthly newsletter together that highlights the work each group has been doing.
Using our community initiatives as a way to be more visible and impactful in our community and advance our 2028 strategy, strengthening our relationships with FESCo and Mindshare and making improvements to our processes and documentation on Council responsibilities are how we believe we can be successful in being a âgoodâ Council for the Fedora Project.