The Fedora Council is considering a change in policy that better defines how the Council will handle withdrawing from sponsored events. The policy as proposed by Ben Cotton, with edits from the Mindshare Committee is:

The Fedora Council may choose to withdraw Fedora’s support from events or other activities that involve fiscal sponsorship or use of Fedora trademarks when it determines that participation is not in the interests of the Fedora Project. Decisions to withdraw support will be published in venues normally used for Council decisions. Deliberation and reasoning for the decision should be public to the extent possible. The Council will engage with the committee/group/team that is involved with the event in question to ensure their input is considered.

This policy proposal was written in response to a request from Justin W. Flory, who noted some lingering resentment over a previous Council decision.

The reasoning behind the way this proposal was crafted includes:

• It makes explicit what is already implicit
• It intentionally does not create a set of rules because pre-writing rules for exceptional cases is incredibly difficult and generally ineffective
• I used a generic “venues normally used” instead of specifying a venue to prevent drift if those venues change later. This isn’t legislation so we don’t need to be strictly prescriptive
• The proposal preserves the right for the Council to have private discussions, but encourages open discussion when possible. This is normally how Council discussions work anyway, but I think it’s worth reiterating here. There are cases where a public discussion is inappropriate, but we should share as much as we can.

Please discuss this on the council-discuss mailing list. Per the Council policy change policy, this will be submitted for a Council vote in two weeks.