Fedora Council Meeting (2026-01-14): Strategy Summit Logistics, Defining Contributors for FESCo Elections, & Mailing List SOPs

Project Discussion
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Happy Wednesday, Fedora folks! :waving_hand: Here is a summary of the recent meeting of the Fedora Council held on January 14, 2026. The Fedora Council is the top-level governance and leadership body for the Fedora Project, responsible for stewardship, strategy, and supporting the distinct Engineering (FESCo) and Mindshare branches of the project.

Topics discussed in this meeting:

  • Strategy Summit 2026: Finalizing logistics for the upcoming gathering in Tirana, Albania.
  • Mailing List Retirement: Establishing an SOP for archiving inactive lists.
  • Voting Eligibility: A complex debate regarding temporary memberships, Join SIG processes, and preventing the “gaming” of FESCo elections.
  • Open Floor: Flock 2026 Call for Proposals (CfP) is now open.

Note: AI (Google Gemini) was used to summarize the Meetbot-generated HTML log of the public meeting. I edited the AI-generated output before making this Fedora Discussion topic. If you notice mistakes, please provide a correction as a reply to this topic.

Executive Summary

The Council convened with a strong quorum to finalize logistics for the upcoming Council Strategy Summit in Tirana, Albania (Feb 2-6, 2026). Key topics for the Strategy Summit were assigned to leadership pairs, specifically regarding Flatpak/Flathub strategies and Konflux/git forge integrations. Remote participation will be prioritized this year, with members encouraged to log their time zones on the Wiki.

A significant portion of the meeting was dedicated to a “spicy” debate regarding Voting Eligibility (Ticket #557). The discussion was sparked by a recent event where a forum user requested temporary SIG membership solely to vote in the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) election. This raised critical governance questions:

  • The Problem: Current voting rights often rely on FAS (Fedora Account System) group membership as a proxy for contribution. This can lead to “gaming” the system or allowing inactive members (from 10+ years ago) to sway elections.
  • The Conflict: There is a tension between the inclusivity goals of the Join SIG/Ambassadors (bringing people in) and the need for a “barrier of entry” to ensure voters are informed, active contributors.
  • Next Steps: The Council did not reach a conclusion during the meeting due to time constraints but recognized this as part of a larger conversation about defining “Active Contributors” and engagement metrics.

Additionally, the Council moved toward finalizing a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for Mailing List Retirement (Ticket #452), aiming to hand this policy off to Infrastructure and Red Hat Community Linux Engineering.

Action Items

Detailed Meeting Log

Ticket #555: Council Strategy Summit 2026 (Tirana, Albania)

  • Logistics: The summit is scheduled for February 2-6, 2026. The group hotel is the Tirana Marriott.

  • Travel: Most airfare should be booked. Red Hat employees must have bookings in Egencia. Non-Red Hat travelers must coordinate with Justin Wheeler (@jflory7).

  • Remote Participation: @jflory7 is testing hardware to ensure effective remote participation. Remote attendees (@nimbinatus, @churchyard, @ryanlerch, @t0xic0der) are asked to list time zone preferences on the Wiki.

  • Agenda Assignments:

    • Flatpak/Flathub: Dave Cantrell (@dcantrell) and Jef Spaleta (@jspaleta) will lead this discussion.
    • Konflux: Aleksandra Fedorova (@bookwar) and Jef Spaleta (@jspaleta) will lead the discussion on Konflux and git forge integration.
    • Social: Jona Azizaj (@jonatoni) is coordinating lunch and the Wednesday dinner.

Ticket #452 Proposal: Mailing list retirement plan

  • Status: This ticket was originally redirected from FESCo to Council and has been pending for nearly 3 years.
  • The Plan: The goal is to establish an Infrastructure policy/SOP for identifying and archiving inactive lists, then hand execution over to the Infrastructure team.
  • Discussion: Laura Santamaria (@nimbinatus) raised a philosophical point that an inactive mailing list is a symptom of an inactive group, touching on larger governance questions about when a group is considered “retired”.
  • Decision: The broader conversation about measuring engagement/inactive groups will be handled at the Strategy Summit. For this specific ticket, the Council will review the draft SOP to close the administrative task.

Ticket #557: Guidance on Join SIG and temporary memberships for voting

  • Context: One forum user requested temporary SIG membership specifically to vote in the FESCo election. This was perceived by some as potential manipulation or “gaming” of the election system.
  • Key Debate Points:
    • The “Contributor” Definition: Determining who gets to vote is difficult because we lack a clear definition of an “active contributor”.
    • Legacy Access: Jef Spaleta (@jspaleta) noted he has voting rights from 10+ years ago despite not currently contributing in that specific area, highlighting that “legacy” access is just as problematic as “temporary” access.
    • Silos vs. Project-Wide: FESCo and Mindshare decisions affect the whole project (based on the organizational hierarchy), yet voting is often gated to specific groups. Council voting is generally more open.
    • Quality vs. Quantity: Aleksandra Fedorova (@bookwar) suggested the Join SIG might be overly eager to “convert” people to contributors (for badge/stats reasons) without ensuring quality engagement.
    • Objective Metrics: Akashdeep Dhar (@t0xic0der) suggested using Datanommer stats to automate eligibility, though Miro HronÄŤok (@churchyard) noted that formalized rules often don’t reflect reality.
  • Outcome: The topic was too complex to resolve in the remaining time. It will likely not be a Strategy Summit topic but requires immediate async discussion on the ticket.

Open Floor

2 Likes
Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #557: Guidance necessary: Join SIG and temporary memberships for the sole purpose of voting in FESCo election
Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #550: A new community policy/doc on what to expect from the Fedora community
Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #555: Council Strategy Summit 2026 – 2-6 February 2026 – Tirana, Albania
Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #452 Proposal: Mailing list retirement plan
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Quick note: it wasn’t a group. it was one individual contributor who asked how to vote given that even though they’d signed the FPCA (is that what it’s still called?) the elections app wouldn’t let them cast their vote. They didn’t ask to be added to a group, a Join SIG contributor saw the thread, vetted them and gave them membership to be able to vote.

@t0xic0der @pboy ^

Edit: the original topic is here:

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/how-can-i-join-the-f43-fesco-election

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After Ankurs post, I took a minute to skim over the meeting. I want to avoid assumptions and confusion, so I see the following possibilities:

  1. the council has more information than I and knows that this has happened already more than once, may it be because they did already some investigation or that this action is something already widespread and known to everyone whereas it was me who somehow missed that development, OR …
  2. there is a misunderstanding: the ticket does consider only one case. With the assumption it is only one case at the moment, the issue of the ticket is not the amount of cases nor the assumption of a corrupted poll.

The related part of my ticket are these:

… … …
When a user on Discourse has asked why they are not allowed to vote for FESCo, a Join SIG member has approached the user and offered them to temporarily add them to the Join SIG FAS group so that they can vote, and then remove them from the SIG again once they have voted (the reason the user could not vote was the CLA+1 / FPCA+1). I treated this as violation with the assumption this is an unintended abuse of powers, as this bypasses a technical restriction that was put there intentionally … … …
… … …
This phenomenon seems to have been not considered before, this being the first (known) case, and since this now has become agreed in Join SIG (and now also communicated pubclicly) that it is ok and intended, it is unclear if and how far this will be used more actively in future (thus how far moderators of channels will end up with this case again). I am not sure how many FESCo voters exist or if the argument of the hundreds of voters (?) is true and thus how far this can practically impact FESCo election outcomes at some point, so I leave this part out as far as it concerns me.
… … …
The more immediate case is obviously for moderation: what and to what extent shall we allow or ignore such cases, and when to intervene.
… … …

So if the information that this was a big thing with many cases is assumed to come from me, please consider it was only one :classic_smiley:

The incident and the subsequent conversation, whose points from both sides I tried to sum up in the ticket, have shown that different people assume something completely different from our rules. And both sides ended up being incompatible to the level one side thought the actions of the other are and will remain violations. This leads to the need of an action or decision before the next CLA+1 poll, which might be separated from strategic actions/decisions if the strategic actions/decisions are not concluded before the next CLA+1 poll begins.

In the ticket, I tried to avoid further assumptions (as inconsistent assumptions that are respectively taken for granted seem to be already part of the problem): this excludes to derive any strategic issue or question or suggestion as they already contain assumptions, but present only the facts and the given case, and leave it to the discussion and the Council to decide what to derive from it and review the different perspectives and their different derivations (for now and the future).

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Thanks for clarifying this. I edited my original post.

Personally, I am not sure what you are referring to here.

So, we will continue to look at this systematically. There are complex questions that came up, like how does one define a contributor or not? What is “good enough” to earn voting rights? These won’t be quick and fast answers.

I expect this topic of how we measure engagement and what defines contribution will come up in the upcoming Fedora Council Strategy Summit:

I think it is reasonable to think we can come up with a solution to this challenge before the next election cycle.

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I merely wanted to say that the Council discussion seems to assume in some posts that there have been many of such cases, and at one point it was implied that there might have been so many of these cases that it questions the legitimacy of the outcome of the last poll.

I can only tell of one case, so if the Council has the information that there are many, this information is not from me. I wanted to ensure that there is no misunderstanding about what I reported in the ticket. I did not question (not even commenting on) what has been concluded or so in the Council discussion! I just wanted to be sure that there is no misunderstanding about what I put in the ticket.

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I must have missed this. I have been around for a while, and I don’t think we have had something warranting a closer look at gaming elections.

For the purpose of the Fedora Council looking into this, we are only going to look at the incident as this one, individual situation.

1 Like