Potential process and policies for approving particular metric collection — a breakout topic for the F40 Change Request on Privacy-preserving telemetry for Fedora Workstation

[catanzaro (Michael Catanzaro)]

Quoting from the change proposal:

The proposal owners feel it is essential to ensure the Fedora community has ultimate oversight over metrics collection. Community control is required to maintain user trust. If this change proposal is approved, then we’ll need new policies and procedures to ensure community oversight over metrics collection and ensure Fedora users can be confident that our metrics collection does not violate their privacy.

We can say “we would never collect personally-identifiable data” and write software that really doesn’t collect any such data, but this alone will never be enough to ensure user confidence. […] We will also want to ensure the Fedora community has ultimate control over which particular metrics are collected. One option is that each metric to be collected should be separately approved by FESCo. Collection of particular metrics in a particular data format is ultimately an engineering decision, and therefore FESCo seems like an appropriate approval point. Because FESCo members are elected regularly by the Fedora community, this also provides the community with ultimate control over metrics collection via the election process. But other oversight and approval structures would work too.

My suggestion that FESCo approve each metric to be collected is sort of a placeholder proposal. It’s a real proposal that we could really do, but there are many other ways we could approve metrics as well (e.g. a subcommittee, a community or developer vote, etc.). I was hoping for more community feedback on what the process should look like, but this has not been a focus of comments provided so far, so here’s a breakout topic to discuss just this.