Fedora Mindshare Committee

Fedora Mindshare Committee logo

The Fedora Mindshare Committee represents the outreach leadership in Fedora. Mindshare aims to help outreach teams reach their targets effectively by unifying and sharing their working process through optimized and standardized communication. It consists of mostly appointed but also elected members.

Responsibilities

Fedora Mindshare Committee takes care of some responsibilities held by other teams, adding some more strategical responsibilities to make sure communication and sharing of ideas, actions and projects can be guaranteed. We track ongoing work through Issues. This ongoing work includes the following:

  • Communication between teams (outreach teams rely on the work of other groups). Fedora Mindshare Committee ensures all information from technical teams will get out in time to all outreach teams, working out also a common strategy with Marketing of how to communicate them outside and how to manage them within all outreach teams.

  • Ambassadors activity: Fedora Mindshare Committee will create templates to help ambassadors to work more effectively. Not only by providing report templates, but also by asking them once a year to compile a short survey. This can help to get real information whether an ambassador is active or not and will not result too binding.

  • Motivate contributors to work also in other groups, providing easier access to funding and more autonomy. This challenging part will need some verifying tools (TBD).

  • Fedora Mindshare Committee takes over all decisional responsibilities left on FAmSCo. Administrative responsibilities will be handled by FAmA, which will consist mainly by treasurers and FAmA admins.

  • CommOps leads the communication between technical and outreach teams.

  • Sharing best practices: One of the Fedora Mindshare Committee’s goals is to take down barriers or whatever is blocking sharing best practices. All teams and all regions can learn from each other and apply successful practices to their local community.

  • Fedora Mindshare Committee will also try to unify ambassadors more and more, also by dropping the actual Regions. They are not helping communication and were created mostly for organizational aspects. FAmA (with treasurers) will help to sort out regional aspects and meetings, but having a unique ambassadors group will help in several ways to be more effective again.

  • Budget: Without regions also the (ex-)regional budgeting process changes. Fedora Mindshare Committee will, in collaboration with the FCA and consequently with the Council, take care of the Fedora outreach budget (sum of the 4 regional budgets). Minor funding requests can be handled directly by FAmA and treasurers, more important expenses will go through Fedora Mindshare Committee, in order to be able and track even necessary reports the Council needs.

Making Decisions

Many basic decisions are made through a process known as "lazy approval", in which general consent is assumed unless valid objections are raised within a period of time — generally three to seven days, although the timeframe should be stated each time and should be proportionate to the impact of the action. This process is used for decisions with short-term consequences and which can be easily reversed. Any project member can ask for the deadline to be extended or the decision escalated to require full consensus.

More significant decisions are made through a process of full consensus. In order to pass, these decisions need three positive votes (+3) and no negative votes (-1). A negative vote immediately halts the process and requires discussion. Therefore, in order to remain valid, negative votes must be supported with a specific concerns about the proposal, and suggestions for what could be changed in order to make the proposal acceptable. A vote of "0" is sometimes used to indicate a disagreement but willingness to stand aside; this should also be accompanied with an explanation.

This model matches Fedora’s "Friends" foundation, which calls for finding acceptable consensus to serve the interests of advancing free software. It works because we work together in a community of mutual respect even when we disagree.

In general, Fedora Mindshare Committee conducts business in public discussion, and any Fedora project member can add more opinions and thoughts. It is the duty of the Fedora Mindshare Committee to take concerns raised in this way into serious consideration, but only Fedora Mindshare Committee members' votes are binding in the final tally.

Where to find Fedora Mindshare Committee

The Fedora Mindshare Committee uses the following communication platforms:

The Discourse forum is best for asynchronous communication. This means it is best for questions or topics that someone may respond to later. It is better for longer, threaded discussions.

The Fedora Mindshare Committee Matrix room is best for synchronous communication. This means it is best for quick feedback, like a conversation. It is helpful for real-time discussions or getting someone’s attention more quickly. For convenience, the Matrix room is also bridged to an IRC channel on the LiberaChat network:

LiberaChat IRC web chat

#fedora-mindshare

Ticket-based task management

The Fedora Mindshare Committee operates in a ticket-based workflow. Our open tickets are in our GitLab repository. New tasks are added as "issues" into GitLab.

This is a public issue tracker. If you have a privacy- or security-sensitive issue, check the This issue is confidential box when creating the issue.

Meetings

The Fedora Mindshare Committee holds regular text-based meetings in a Matrix room to discuss current issues, clear through anything outstanding which can be quickly resolved, and ensure that nothing important is left in limbo. The meeting format is intended to be quick updates and long discussion. It is a good opportunity to check in with other members of the team in real-time and understand what is going on in their area, while allowing anyone in the public to observe how the Fedora Mindshare Committee operate.

The meeting minutes are published automatically on Fedora Meetbot Logs.

Composition

Fedora Mindshare Committee Structure

Fedora Mindshare Committee has appointed and elected members, and initially there will be 9 seats:

  • FCA (chair)

  • Ambassadors (2 appointed members)

  • Website & Apps (appointed)

  • Design (appointed)

  • Docs (appointed)

  • CommOps (appointed)

  • 2 elected seats

  • Mentored Project Rep

Note: The minimum of elected representatives is two. Three representatives are elected when the number of seats would otherwise be even.

Current members

  • Fedora Community Architect (FCA): Justin W. Flory (jflory7)

  • Ambassador Representative: TBD

  • Ambassador Representative: FAmA Nick Bebout (nb)

  • CommOps Representative: Alberto Rodríguez Sánchez (bt0dotninja / bt0)

  • Website & Apps Representative: Onuralp Sezer (thunderbirdtr)

  • Design Representative: Máirín Duffy (Duffy)

  • Docs Representative: Petr Bokoč (pbokoc)

  • Mentored Project Representative: Smera Goel (smeragoel)

  • Elected Representative: Madeline Peck (madelinepeck) (f37-f38)

  • Elected Representative: Fernando F. Mancera (ffmancera) (f38-f39)

Former members

Appointed
Elected
  • F27-F31: Jared Smith (jsmith)

  • F29-F32: Sumantro Mukherjee (sumantrom)

  • F32-F33: Héctor Louzao (hhlp)

  • F33-F34: Maria Leandro (tatica)

  • F34-F36: Till Maas (till)

  • F37: David Duncan (davdunc)