Thanks for replying, and for your rigorous approach to this matter. I have thought well when choosing the word “denying”. In my opinion, it can be considered as such, given that:
Community members with similar “profile” (active Discourse members, TL3+, no group membership besides FPCA, etc) have no access to FESCo voting. Most of them understand they are not eligible based on the message they receive when trying to vote.
There is no documented or otherwise known way to request for temporary group membership that would grant FESCo voting rights specifically. It happened to one forum regular[1] who was posting here on Discourse asking for details on why they couldn’t vote.
Not every aforementioned community member had seen the topic mentioned above, in order to find out that there could be a particular way to obtain FESCo voting rights.
Even those community members seeing the above mentioned topic wouldn’t have felt comfortable asking for temporary Join SIG membership IMO.
Whom I do respect and appreciate, as I do feel towards the Join SIG group member granting temporary membership. ↩︎
Hi everyone, this topic is getting quite a lot of discussion, and the Fedora Council has yet to review this topic yet since the year began. I am turning on slow mode until the next Fedora Council meeting on 2026-01-14T15:00:00Z. We will discuss this topic in our next meeting.
Additionally, please keep discussion in this topic on Fedora Discussion instead of the Pagure ticket. It will help us to keep the discussion in one place only. Pagure is only used for recording decisions and summarizing meeting discussions by the Council. I am going to delete the comments on Pagure to try and keep the discussion centralized here.
Thanks, and I really appreciate the clarification. I continue to think that we are agreeing on the main goal: equal access to voting for all eligible community members.
The difference, in my view, is that we’re approaching it from two different views—active denial vs technical/systemic barriers.
Forum users (and many others in teams that do not use FAS groups) that should be able to vote but cannot because they lack CLA+1 are currently being excluded by a technical requirement—this is the technical/systemic barrier.
Helping one person isn’t denying others, it is simply failing to solve the problem for everyone at once—it only solved this for the one individual.
The real focus should be on finding ways in which this problem is solved for everyone. Instead, when we speak of this one action as “denying others”, we are seeing a positive action that a community member did in a negative light, as if it was wrong (as some sort of procedural violation).
I agree to this. But as Join SIG rejected to stop pursuing this way of action until a Council ticket comes to a conclusion in any direction, I must also ask for a more immediate (interim) clarification of this type of case rather than waiting for something strategic being implemented for the long term, as I neither want to ignore these cases nor act against them without consensus/guideline. The feedback makes it also unclear if and how often such cases are to be faced in future, now that it is agreed in Join SIG that this is an intended way of using temp. memberships. Hope that makes some sense too
so my interpretation of the situation right now based on the two process links that you’ve provided is this..
the +1 group requirement is an imperfect proxy for the intent to ensure active contributors are able to be represented in what is intended to be a contributor voting process. This is noone’s fault. Its understood to be a suboptimal proxy.
Imperfect In that there are a lot of ways to actively contribute to Fedora that don’t require an additional FAS group and a lot of FAS groups that were spun up but not representative of active contribution. I probably had voting rights for a decade+ when I wasn’t active for example because I’m sitting in a one person fas group of my own sponsoring. The fact that I could have been voting after I very deliberately stepped away to do other things, while at the same time its hard for new contributors who can make a reasonable claim to be active contributors over the last several months, its a sort of a double bind of sorts. The proxy being used right now over estimates contributors that exist and at the same time makes it hard to identify new contributors to reach out to and establish eligibility for rights/responsibilities conferred to active contributors.
And to be clear I think active contribution should confer both more rights and responsibilities than just usage. That being said, there has to be a mitigation process that takes the imperfect proxy of the fas group stuff into account to ensure people who understand themselves to be active contributors to be able to vote and feel represented. Because again, you don’t necessarily need to be in a +1 fas group to be an active contributor, its just a proxy that makes the eligibility easy to code up and check.
So if someone who in good faith feels like they are an active contributor over the last few months, wants to vote in FESCO elections but isn’t in a an additional fas group.. whats that suppose to look like?
I actually have a lot of questions and concerns about how well we even understand what the size of the active contributor base is that should be eligible to vote. There’s a subset of contribution I think is well defined… but not everything. The fact that there is a process to effectively roll people out of the packager group when they are inactive for long enough (I was at least) seems to indicate that particular set of contributors would have a reasonable eligibility count. But elsewhere, I’m far less sure. The fact that I’m still in the irc moderator fas group for example is suggestive that a lot of the group memberships isn’t being curated in the same way. What I see in fas is a partial historical record more than anything else.
I do agree with your comments. Talking for myself, I don’t feel like an “active contributor”, since what I do is mostly reply the keepalive to continue building the i3 Spin and some moderation here in discussion, so I’m not sure what a “active contributor” looks like in the practice: Does it look like me: reading all emails in devel list, stumbling upon the forum, answering from time to time, keeping a spin alive by just answering a ticket? or does it look more like the guy who maintain the packages for the i3 windows manager, keeping it updated for Fedora users?
For this ticket I hope 2 outcomes:
More clarity on what contributions are? (like forum participation, email answering, packaging, infra engineering, etc)
More clarity on who are supposed to vote on what elections and how to advertise that in the election marketing campaigns, so people can understand if they are eligible to vote.
Okay first let me say…
I’m trying real hard to be respectful of the slow mode. I think I have some sort of superpower conferred to me that lets this account ignore slow mode.. and I need to make sure I don’t unintentionally overstep and use a power in peer discussions when its meant for emergencies. That would be unfair and inappropriate. I’m watching out for that. My last post shows 4h elapsed timestamp.. so I’m probably okay now.
Now with that out of the way…
I would consider moderation to be contribution of significance. Primarily because its work I would otherwise have to attempt (and fail at doing well at the scale that is needed), if community members did not contribute their time and effort on that. And I am grateful for it.
The i3 thing, I don’t use, so its difficult for me to be grateful for it. But there are probably people out there who are using i3 and are probably grateful for the effort even if you think its minimal. That probably means it counts… for the same reasons I consider the effort others put into moderation as contribution.
We just don’t seem to have a mechanism to capture that sense of gratefulness of the effort other people are making in a way that provides validation that its contribution to Fedora as a collective endeavor and not merely self-serving itch scratching.
We also probably don’t have a mechanism to capture what it means to contribute to Fedora by ensuring work is done in upstream that materially benefits Fedora users either. That’s even harder to capture, but its still probably a contribution of significance. If upstream maintainers are doing things like making Fedora primary CI/CD testing targets and working with ‘us’ to stay ahead of problems that’s kinda significant as a contribution.
There’s a lot of ways to contribute that is probably unsung, ways I’m not aware of, but other people in the Fedora community are and could credible argue is an active contribution.
With the risk of repeating what I implied in the original topic, does it make sense to split this into an interim decision for the implications of the here and now (in order to create a common agency / predictable action-response in the community) and then focus on a reliable long term solution (without time pressures or, in the meantime, risks for incidents of people with incompatible interpretations of the rules in the here and now considering each other’s actions as violation) ?
It is less fear of a (iterated but finite) Prisoner Dilemma among SIGs (that fear to be not sufficiently heard compared to others or so) now that this idea of the rules is public nor the exclusion case, but more that this ends up in more cases in which one side derives adding people temporarily to any SIG to offer voting rights is ok, and another assuming this a violation, leading to conflicts and chaotic agency in the community (also in other channels). The major immediate risk might be not the (amount/proportion of) voters but “reciprocally unexpected but perceived illegitimate” conflicts among members that can damage (working) relationships in an environment that from now on is unclear in this aspect.
I could imagine the Council can quickly consent to any of the variants (may it be allowed in the meantime to temporarily add people for voting or not, adding members in general only for the actual purpose/activities of the own SIG’s or not, for Join SIG only or others too, whatever), communicate it, close the case and then shift attention to the strategic issue, which might be useful to be put in a new topic/ticket that does not center around a specific incident/user that is only of limited relevance for the strategic questions around, if not even distracting.
The next elections are for F44, so I don’t think is necessary to rush any decision or take any immediate action. There are plenty of time to get to any conclusion.
If so, sure. But the direction this goes into might indicate major changes, and that might need much subsequent evaluation and coordination, and then development and testing before putting into practice, which can take some time. This can quickly exceed a few months if it is something that is intended for the long term. And even if so, It might still be useful to be put into a dedicated ticket, avoiding distractions or blurs.
What is the process right now by which SIGs are created that spells out exactly when a SIG is able to establish an identity with a FAS group? Is it because they need particular infra access?
A SIG is created when it declares that it exists. It is meant to be
light weight.
Anyone can request a fas group for tracking their sig members.
Many people request fas groups to help them manage copr groups.
Could I just create a Fedora Curling SIG today and get a FAS group today for it? I’ve done the groundwork.. I know there are enough people to create an international Fedora curling team with Fedora branded curling jackets as an outreach effort. I could probably have a 40 person group this week on a wiki page no problem. But what’s the process that gates getting an associated fas account?
A infra request for it.
The point being, I have deep concerns about tying voting rights to arbitrary FAS groups because there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to how and when FAS groups are created and removed.
How many SIGs right now are in fact just ghost fas groups and are effectively non-functional with no attachment points for onboarding new contributors?
If you want to tie voting strongly with SIGs, then we need to have SIGs being functional self-governing groups.. and not what they laissez-faire structures as the exist right now.
Perhaps! I know theres been a lot of discussion in the council and
community ops groups around “what is a contributor”. Since a council
goal right now is to grow contributors that seems like a good thing to
have a commonly agreed critera for and if it could be something a
elections app could tell that would be ideal. Right now we had fas
groups for showing that someone cared enough to make a group or get
someone to add them to a group.
Newly-minted FESCo member here and long-time Fedoran, including managing the Fedora Design SIG membership for 17+ years (for which we had a rigorous join process requiring contribution, but didn’t really manage offboarding in a routine way.)
First, some scenarios:
1. Ideal case (the world is not ideal)
Membership in any one SIG indicates active* contribution** to Fedora. Active Fedora contributors should be able to vote for the project governance that applies to their contributions.
2. Worst case (targeting Fedora)
Bad actors / random people on the internet / groups that wish harm to Fedora decide they’d like to participate in Fedora’s elections to sway them a certain way. They use the Join SIG temporary passthru to access voting.
3. Worst case (targeting individual candidates)
A candidate running for election falls under a specific identity or has specific positions that have inspired folks who don’t actually use Fedora nevermind contribute decide to target this candidate. So they start a campaign against the candidate and use the Join SIG temporary passthru to access voting.
* What does “active” mean, exactly?
** What does “contribution” mean, exactly?
Some implications of these scenarios
We cannot count on SIG membership to indicate active contribution to Fedora.
If we care about accounts being active: We likely have metadata in FAS around last login that can indicate the staleness / activeness of an account, and that could be used as part of the voting gate.
We do not have a standardized way to qualify what contribution is and lookup / validate it.
If the Join SIG is going to enable voting via this temporary Join SIG FAS group membership approach, the Join SIG needs to have specific guidelines to determine the activeness and the contribution of individuals approaching them asking for this access.
Ideally, the individuals asking for Join SIG access would be known to Join SIG members.
Ideally, the Join SIG members granting access would validate that the individuals requesting access have actually contributed to Fedora in some way and that they are active.
There are probably eligible voters not voting due to lacking access who are unaware of this program.
It is unclear if the Join SIG can / should have to scale to accommodate all potential eligible voters and “bad actor” requestors of voting rights. The latter is a risk that could overwhelm and prevent legitimate requestors from obtaining access.
My questions based on this analysis
For the Join SIG
How is the Join SIG assessing qualification for election? The “vetting” @ankursinha alluded to?
Does the Join SIG have a rubric / checklist used for this vetting? Is the vetting standardized, or ad-hoc?
Who on the Join SIG has authorization to conduct this vetting? (all? FAS group admins only? …?)
Why is the Join SIG the SIG offering this service? How does this align with the Join SIG’s charter?
How often is this service used? Do you have #'s on how many requests resulted in granted access and how many resulted in denied access? Were all requests processed or did some not get resolved?
How are requests for this service managed? Pagure tickets? Something else?
For the Council
Do we have written documentation defining what being an active contributor is?
Does it fall under the Council’s purview to own the definition of what a Fedora “contributor” is? If not, what SIG / governance group would best own this?
Does it fall under the Council’s purview to own the definition of what an “active” Fedora contributor is? If not, what SIG / governance group would best own this?
My recommendations based on what I know
If it is decided by the Council that this “service” for voting access is legitimate,
the Join SIG, if they have not already, should draft a formal policy around this service.:
The Join SIG, if they do not already, should have a rubric for assessing a FAS account holder’s eligibility for this voting access service.
The Join SIG should define and justify which members of the Join SIG are allowed to make these decisions based on the rubric and who are not.
The Join SIG should also define how to resolve disagreements of any individual’s eligibility assessment within the group (or escalate to another body such as the Council.)
The Join SIG should define timelines / deadlines / etc. for access to this service depending on scale of usage, out of fairness.
The Fedora Council should review and approve this policy before it’s put into effect.
Some of the points you bring up are well understood in various membership based organizations (called, in various forms, board capture), where it is easy to create additional “voters” to direct the results. Some one/group with a long term agenda can easily manage to take control of the decision making processes (one org I regularly participate in changed their bylaws to address the potential).
I would recommend that the Council engage some actual experts in corporate governance (and not the arm-chair experts in corporate governance (of which I include myself)) to understand, and make some recommendations, as to various paths forward here.
I would go further.. it seems like a necessary thing.
Putting the FESCO election eligibility question aside for the moment…
What if instead of trying to count fas groups we found a way to use the badges system and had something like a contributor badge with variants every year that was issued algorithmically based on discoverable activity that was used as criteria or by an individual request process to a group with delegated authority to issue the contributor badges for contributors that arent yet captured by the algorithm (using a human review process).
If we felt this approach worked a little better to keep up with active contributors, then FESCO may find its a better proxy for the intended eligibility.. and keep the workload on infra down to a minimum. Trying to clean up the stale fas groups every election cycle feels like the wrong way to get there, in that it puts a load on infra. yearly badges may be overall less work.
I would go further.. it seems like a necessary thing.
yeah.
Putting the FESCO election eligibility question aside for the moment…
What if instead of trying to count fas groups we found a way to use the badges system and had something like a contributor badge with variants every year that was issued algorithmically based on discoverable activity that was used as criteria or by an individual request process to a group with delegated authority to issue the contributor badges for contributors that arent yet captured by the algorithm (using a human review process).
If we felt this approach worked a little better to keep up with active contributors, then FESCO may find its a better proxy for the intended eligibility.. and keep the workload on infra down to a minimum. Trying to clean up the stale fas groups every election cycle feels like the wrong way to get there, in that it puts a load on infra. yearly badges may be overall less work.
Well, it would make badges a critical path application then I would
guess, and would need someone(s) to figure out what activity was
required, but yeah, could work otherwise.
If we wanted to leave badges out of it, it could just be some
script/process that added/removed folks from a (possibly hidden in the
same way fedora-contributor is now) group.
part of this is needing some mechanism so people can know if they are counted as active contributor so a hidden group don’t help.
But keeping the badges out of the critical path is a reasonable concern… i can see the badges layering over a public group that was populated/timstamp refreshed on a cadence. The idea with the badged years was just so we had a sense of both appreciation and timeliness. Need something with a refreshable timestamp that would have correctly prevented me from being counted as an active contributor for the decade+ I was away, but still counted me historically as a contributor. Badged years would do it. So to that point, is it possible to keep both a creation and modification timestamp on group memberships?
It is meant to be