FESCo is the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. It is a fully community elected body and represents the technical leadership in Fedora.
Overall Mission
FESCo handles the process of accepting new features, the acceptance of new packaging sponsors, Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and SIG Oversight, the packaging process, handling and enforcement of maintainer issues and other technical matters related to the distribution and its construction.
Common tasks and responsibilities
FESCo is responsible for technical issues and coordination of technical resources for the project.
Issues FESCo handles include:
- Approval and coordination of "changes" for Fedora releases.
- Package maintainer disputes
- Larger changes to the Fedora Package collection
- Guidance and technical direction for other parts of the project
- Setting the schedule for Fedora development cycles.
- Reviewing and approving technical content from Fedora Working groups (Product Requirement Docs, deliverables, processes).
- Responsible for what software is offered to end users under what conditions.
- Oversight and approval of new spins and other media that doesn't fit under a working group.
FESCo has empowered the FPC (Fedora Packaging Comittee) to handle management of packaging guidelines, so those items are usually deferred to them with occasional FESCo oversight.
Candidates for FESCo should be people who have a wide breadth of knowledge about the Fedora Project as a whole and who understand how the many different pieces fit together. Ideal candidates should also have a history of fostering inter-team coordination.
FESCo has a designate for each Working Group that coordinates with that Group and communicates back to FESCo any issues or concerns. Currently there are: Workstation, Server and Atomic Working groups.
Members
- Kevin Fenzi (nirik) - F26/F27
- Randy Barlow (bowlofeggs) - F27/F28
- Adam Miller (maxamillion) - F26/F27
- Dennis Gilmore (dgilmore) - F27/F28
- Jared Smith (jsmith) - F26/F27
- Justin Forbes (jforbes) - F26/F27
- Kalev Lember (kalev) - F26/F27
- Till Maas (till) - F27/F28
- Stephen Gallagher (sgallagh) - F27/F28
Chair is rotating.
You can find their mission statements (issued during the last FESCo-election) here . Members of previous FESCos can be found here .
Agenda
Generally, issues are voted on in FESCo. A majority of the committee (that is, 5 of 9) is required to pass a proposal. Votes can be accepted in the agenda tickets as well as the meeting, however, if less than 5 members are able to attend a meeting, the meeting is cancelled.
Meetings
FESCo meets usually each Friday at 16:00 UTC or 15:00 UTC (when daylight saving time applies) on the Freenode IRC Network (irc.freenode.net) in #fedora-meeting. You should verify the meeting date and time from the devel mail "Plan for tomorrow's FESCo meeting" being sent in advance.
FESCo meeting discussions will last for 15 minutes. At the end of the 15 minute discussion one of the following actions may be taken:
- If there is a vote to continue, then discussion continues for an additional 15 minutes.
- If there is no vote to continue the discussion after the initial 15 minutes, ask those members who are discussing the issue to clearly write up their thoughts and position on a wiki page for consideration at the next meeting. Each view point can list their thoughts as a separate proposal, or work off-line with others, to come up with a single proposal acceptable to them all. The wiki page is used in the next meeting to guide discussions and voting.
All requests for consideration by the steering committee (including group sponsorship requests and maintainer-ship issues) should be submitted as a ticket:
Meeting Minutes
You can find FESCO's meeting minutes at the fedora meetbot site as well as posted to the devel@lists.fedoraproject.org list after each meeting. Note that meetings prior to the 2010-10-20 meeting were on Tuesdays.
Mailing List
FESCo has a private mailing list for sensitive matters. This list will have as subscribers only the current FESCo members and the Fedora Project Leader. This list should only be used in very rare situations with private information. The FESCo chair will make sure any discussion on this list that doesn't need to be private will be resent to a public forum (FESCo issue tracker, devel list, etc).