Relations between the Board and FESCo
During the merge period before Fedora 7 there were multiple discussion on different topics where it was partly unclear if the Board or FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) was responsible or the first to act to make a decision. This document tries to clarify the working areas of the two and the relations of them to each other and other groups in the Fedora project that the two have to work with.
Digest
The Fedora Board is responsible for the Fedora Project as a whole. But it cannot nor wants to decide each and every detail alone. Thus the Boards delegates specific tasks to different groups. For the Linux distribution known as Fedora it delegates the work to FESCo -- but as this product is the core of the project the Board wants to get informed of the ongoing workings and decisions and involved in major decisions done by FESCo that are highly relevant to the project as a whole.
Even FESCo on the other hand can't do everything alone, as creating and maintaining a Linux distribution is a whole lot of work. Thus it concentrates on the most important stuff and delegates other work to subgroups and committees, which FESCo coordinates and work with hand in hand.
In Detail
The digest above should be enough to get the rough scheme, but this section below will get into the details a bit more in depth and give some examples in the hope to make in more clear with areas the two groups works on and how they interact.
Board
The Fedora Board takes care of coordinating the different high-level groups that work on different areas of the project -- like Ambassadors, FESCo or Infrastructure. Those groups work on their own mostly, but the Board should roughly know what happens and should get involved when important decisions are made that matter to the project as a whole or are of major relevance for the other high-level groups. Those thus need to keep the Board informed about major decisions or working areas by sending summaries from their meetings, decisions and workings. The Board further reserves the right to take part in meetings and get heard before decisions are made; really important decisions are best done by the Board and the group together.
As open communication and a transparent decision process should be maintained anyway both public summaries and public meetings should be nothing special normally -- but in the relations with FESCo this is important, as FESCo works on the to the outside most visible and for us thus most important area of the project.
FESCo
FESCo as Fedora Engineering Steering Committee integrates what was up to Fedora 7 known as "Core Cabal", "Fedora Extras Steering Committee" and (in parts) "Fedora Packaging Committee" -- thus it takes care of the Linux distribution Fedora as a whole. That includes, but is nor limited to, the Schedule, Roadmap, Freezes or Features to concentrate on. That's a whole lot of work, thus FESCo hands over specific work areas to smaller groups like:
- Release Team
- QA group
- Packaging Committee
- EPEL
There are further some smaller groups (some or them are called SIGs -- Special interest groups), that take care of highly specific work areas like specific distribution spins, type of applications (games, perl, python, kernel, toolchain, desktop, java ...), selected architectures or other stuff.
All those groups have to interact with FESCo and the other groups similar how FESCo interacts with the Board and other high-level groups -- that includes stuff like, open meetings, summaries of workings and decisions as well as getting FESCo or even both FESCo and the Board involved in important decisions. FESCo itself will sometimes get the Board involved in important FESCo work areas like:
- Schedule
- Relations to Red Hat
- Changes in the distribution that might have a strong impact on RHEL
- new work areas like a new architecture to support
- everything that is related to the Open Source politics of the Project;
- FIXME: suggestions for more?
But even in this areas FESCo will normally be the driving group which has to make sure the stuff is done.