Env and Stacks/Governance Charter

This page is a draft only
It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page. This Is an Unratified Draft Document

This document describes the governing structure for the Fedora Environment and Stacks Working Group.

Will Be Re-evaluated after Fedora 21 Is Released
See the #Changing_these_Rules section for more details.

Membership

The Fedora Environments and Stacks Working Group has nine voting members, one selected by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee as the liaison to FESCo, and the others initially selected by the FESCo liaison.

Continuity is not as important with the Environments and Stacks Working Group as other Working Groups since we are incubating fresh new ideas so we choose our voting members via election.

• Elections for half the seats will be held afer every fedora release (approximately 6 months) to match with fesco. Elected members serve for two releases before needing to stand for re-election

• Both candidates and the electorate must have signed the FPCA and be in one other non-cla group to show that they are Fedora Contributors. This is the same group of people as the FESCo electorate.

The first election should coincide with the FESCo election that occurs near January 2015.

Current Members

• John Dulaney
• Honza Horak
• Tadej Janež
• Slavek Kabrda
• Sam Kottler
• Petr Kovar
• Toshio Kuratomi
• Marcela Mašláňová (FESCo Liaison)
• Jens Petersen
• Debi Rieden

Making Decisions

Because Fedora is a global project, members of the working group may be distributed across multiple timezones. It may be possible to have real-time IRC meetings, but in general we will conduct business on the Environments and Stacks mailing list.

Meetings During the Initial Phase
During this initial period where we are creating governance documentation and laying out initial plans, we will likely have more meetings than normal. At this time we've allocated two time slots for those meetings. Odd week numbers (determine week numbers with date +"%V") will be on Tuesday at 16:00UTC, even week numbers will be on Tuesday at 13:00UTC. Each of those times has conflicts for at least some members so we should attempt to get as much done on the mailing list as possible. These will likely be abandoned around January 2014 when the initial phase of creating the Working Groups wraps up.

Many of our decisions can be made through "lazy consensus". Under this model, an intended action is announced on the mailing list, discussed, and if there is no controversy or dissenting views within three days, simply done.

For bigger issues (where there is disagreement, a long-term impact, or where an action may not easily be undone) we will have more formal voting. Working group members can vote +1 to approve, -1 to disagree, or 0 to abstain. Abstentions serve to remove one person from being counted towards pass or failure. So, with no abstentions, a simple majority of five members is necessary to pass a measure. With two abstentions, four +1 votes are necessary, and so forth. Note that neglecting to vote is not equivalent to abstaining. You must explicitly cast a +0 vote if you wish to remove yourself from being counted towards pass or fail.

We will use the ticketing system at [1] to record our votes. Non-members may comment on the ticket (and, of course, discuss on the mailing list) but are asked to refrain from putting votes in the ticket. Working Group Members should add their +1, 0, or -1 votes as comments to the ticket.

Changing These Rules

This document will be approved by consensus of the initial Working Group members and approved by FESCo. After initial ratification, any substantive changes can be approved by majority vote and sent to FESCo for acceptance.

Will Be Re-evaluated after Fedora 21 Is Released
This document is based on the Cloud Working Groups Governance document. However, the Environment and Stack WG is very different. The Cloud WG has a mission of creating a specific Fedora Product. The Environments and Stacks Working Group is more of a research and development group that may end up launching wholly new products or helping to build technologies and procedures that help the other WGs produce their products. As such, we're going to re-evaluate whether the governance we've adopted here is a good fit for what we do in practice after we've had a little time to see what work we actually do. In particular, the membership section may be heavily changed as continuity may not be as important for this group as for the Product creating groups.