Day 1 Summary: Strategy & Governance
Yesterday (Tuesday) kicked off the 2026 Strategy Summit in Tirana. 
Our primary focus was refining the long-term governance structure of the project and exploring new ways to empower community-driven innovation.
1. The “Fedora Project as a Weird University” Model for Governance
@jspaleta presented the “State of the Strategy,” introducing a new metaphor for how we view Fedora Project’s governance: The (Weird Fedora) University Model.
In @jspaleta’s view, the Fedora Council acts less like a corporate board and more like University Regents. Our goal is to charter and support various “Departments” (SIGs, Editions, Working Groups) that have the “academic freedom” to innovate, while the Regents and Administration ensure the lights stay on, the campus is safe, and resources are distributed fairly.
Red Hat looks at Fedora as a primary “Innovation Engine” funding the research, while Fedora provides the “Campus” where that innovation is distributed and graded.
Discussion then happened about if and how we can change or adjust Red Hat’s view on the project. No specific action items were created.
2. Exploring Open Collective
We discussed the need for a more flexible financial structure to handle community engineering grants and sponsorships. The Council is officially investigating Open Collective as a potential technical platform to manage these funds. We discussed the topic of Fiscal Hosts and some alternatives
At this time, we want to try the Open Collective platform on a small-scale project, like funding a specific event. But then we want to come up with a framework to include “engineering grants” to the picture, possibly modelled similarly to Outreachy.
We are not yet announcing a specific Fiscal Host entity at this stage, as legal and finance reviews are still ongoing.
Action: @jspaleta is going to get the initial approval from Red Hat. More details are going to be presented at Flock to Fedora 2026.
3. Defining “Fedora Membership”
The major topic of debate on Tuesday was defining what a contributor and a contribution are in Fedora. After nearly three hours of intense debate, we ultimately decided that we did NOT want to create any definition, broad or narrow, for what makes someone a Fedora contributor or what is actually a valid contribution to Fedora. This probably sounds strange!
However, the reason we ultimately decided not to define a contributor or contribution is because we do not want to limit the possible contribution paths in Fedora. But as we need a more formal structure for the governance of the project, we decided to architect something brand new: a Membership status and a “membership team” (name TBD) which would approve and evaluate member applications. Specifically, this would be a system that relies on rules, like membership in specific groups or existing members “vouching” for others in order to be sponsored as a Fedora “member.”
- Broadening the Base: This body would review membership applications from contributors whose work (design, marketing, advocacy) doesn’t fit the existing automated checks (e.g. membership in the
packagergroup). - Active Lifecycle: We are also discussing a policy for the expiration of inactive memberships. To ensure our voting body accurately reflects the current active community, membership should be a status you maintain through activity, not a lifetime appointment.
Action items: @jflory7 to start working on the proposal to bring to the Fedora Council and the Fedora community. We hope to use this status for the F45 election cycle (Dec 2026)
4. The Road to Flock
Everything discussed today are concepts, not a decree or even a defined proposal. Our goal is to refine these concepts into concrete drafts that we will present at Flock to Fedora 2026. We want to use the conference as the primary venue to workshop these ideas with the community face-to-face and gather community consensus.
Specific milestones will come as we get to the end of the Strategy Summit, but we are working with the Fedora release cycles (i.e. F44 and F45) and Flock as major checkpoints.