Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #536: Create a communications handbook for Fedora Council

[jflory7 (Justin Wheeler)]

@jflory7 filed Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #536. Discuss here and record votes and decisions in the ticket.

Ticket text:

@@jflory7

Summary

This ticket proposes the creation of a communications handbook to establish a consistent strategy and clear guidelines for how the Fedora Council communicates with the community and other project bodies.

Background

This proposal originates from a face-to-face meeting between Fedora Council and FESCo delegates, where a lack of consistent communication strategy from the Council was identified as a key challenge. Unlike FESCo, which has well-established communication methods, the Council’s approach has been inconsistent. This perception was reinforced during the Flock conference, where community members expressed that the Council can feel “invisible and not very approachable.” Adopting a more deliberate and consistent communication practice is essential for improving the Council’s visibility, effectiveness, and connection to the community.

Details

The goal is to collaboratively create a communications handbook, not to prescribe a solution upfront. As Fedora Community Architect (FCA), I am self-assigning myself to facilitate this process, which will follow these steps:

1. Discuss this ticket at the next Fedora Council meeting. The goal for the meeting discussion is to reflect on our current communication methods, their effectiveness, and the value of different channels.
2. Using the feedback from this discussion, I will create a first draft of the communications handbook.
3. The first draft will be shared with other Fedora governance bodies—including FESCo, the Mindshare Committee, and the EPEL Steering Committee—for a review and feedback period.
4. The draft will also be shared publicly with the wider Fedora community. We encourage participation from anyone who has constructive ideas on how the Fedora Council can better communicate.
5. The FCA will incorporate the collected feedback to finalize the handbook for formal approval by the Council.

Outcome

The result will be a Council-approved communications handbook that, through its consistent use, makes Council activities more visible, transparent, and approachable to the entire Fedora community.

[jflory7 (Justin Wheeler)]

@amoloney Think you could help get this scheduled for the Council meeting this Wednesday? I will be on PTO this week so I will not be there, but I think y’all could have a fruitful discussion on this topic without me too.

[amoloney (Aoife Moloney)]

Yep, sure thing I’ll add it to the agenda. Ideally we could try to find an owner/driver for the draft from the discussion on Wednesday. Thanks for filing this ticket @jflory7

[amoloney (Aoife Moloney)]

We didn’t get time to discuss this in today’s meeting an hour is sometimes not long enough! I have a few questions though that I would be interested in getting some feedback on.

1. At Flock during the council AMA, a question was asked on how people can provide feedback to the council. Do we have a good mechanism for addressing this right now? If we dont, what would our options be do you think? I leaned towards a classic ‘ticket in the repo’ path, but maybe there are better ways.

2. Long form communication. Where should we be having discussions? I default to the public council matrix room, but I don’t think I’m doing that right. Is discussion.fedoraproject.org the better space? How can we accommodate long-form discussion in this space? We have a space here but is it set up to be usable for this kind of communication?

What are other peoples thoughts on those two items?