Community working group

Fedora Community Working Group

Mission

The long-term goal of the Community Working Group is to help to maintain a friendly and welcoming community, thereby ensuring the Fedora Project remains a great project enjoyed by all contributors and users

Members

5 members, appointed by the Board:

• Robyn Bergeron
• Kevin Fenzi
• Matthew Garrett
• Sandro "red" Mathys (will be replaced ~soon)
• Brian Pepple

Contact

• cwg mailing list (archived, public)
• cwg-private mailing list (unarchived, private) - the public list should be preferred whenever possible
• IRC: #fedora-cwg on freenode (also read How to use IRC)
• Feel free to contact any member of the group privately (see their user page on how they prefer to be contacted).

Meetings

Meeting schedules and summaries can be found here. Meetings are held in the #fedora-meeting channel on IRC.

Charter

Introduction

As a large, diverse community the Fedora Project benefits from having both a trustworthy central point of contact for questions about communication between participants as well as a respected independent mediator between contributors and users of the Fedora Project.

The Community Working Group aims to act as a central point of contact by being available to communicate needs between various groups within project, including group leaders, contributors, and users. The group also acts as mediator upon request in the rare cases where the communication breaks down.

This group is chartered by and accountable to the Fedora Project Board.

Goal and Strategy

The long-term goal of the Community Working Group is to help to maintain a friendly and welcoming community, thereby ensuring the Fedora Project remains a great project enjoyed by all contributors and users. A participative approach is employed, which presents the Community Working Group as supporting staff who help where help is needed. The group is prepared to help out community members whenever they request support, for example in cases where a member becomes targeted by a group of malicious individuals or when a member has problems expressing opinions or ideas because of a language difficulty. Additionally we will actively approach people where we feel it is necessary, although this is expected to be in exceptional cases only.

Tasks for the Working Group

Short term tasks may include:

• Create clear and easy points of contact, including a mailing list, irc channels.
• Assisting to write a Fedora Code of Conduct (or recommending that one is not needed).
• Determine how best to work together and coordinate efforts with other groups within fedora dealing with similar concepts and goals, including FAMSCo, FESCo, irc-support-sig, Hall Monitors, mailing list moderators, Websites-sig (planet).
• Decide how to deal with different types and degree of conflict

Staffing

The inner-circle of the Community Working Group is the mailing list where most issues are being discussed. Mail from outside the CWG staff is moderated, but all legitimate mail will be accepted (i.e. spam will be dropped, all mail related to the activities of the CWG will be accepted). On occasions individuals may be invited to join the mailing list in order that particular aspects of the CWG's work may be discussed. There are occasions when a place for private conversation about public matters is helpful and even necessary, particularly when the matter has reached the state where de-escalation is required. Having a safe and private area to handle such matters not only makes it easier to establish calm and reason, but often provides the sort of confidentiality that is needed when discussing sensitive or even embarrassing issues. <mailing list reference> is a private mailing list, therefore issues discussed on the list must not be disclosed without permission from the CWG and those involved in any particular issue. We ask people who wish to stay anonymous to approach a trusted member of the Community Working Group, who will then bring the issue forward to the rest of the Group.

The Community Working Group is made up of people who have track records of working on these sorts of issues and who have proven to have qualities relevant for community work.

This charter will stand until one year after ratification (Oct 25, 2010), at which point it will be revisited and an updated charter submitted for renewal and continuation of the Community Working Group.

References

• A major portion of this draft was shamelessly borrowed from the KDE Community Working Group charter