Voting in the Fedora Linux 38 elections is now open. Go to the Elections app to cast your vote. Voting closes at 23:59 UTC on Sunday 11 June. Don’t forget to claim your “I Voted” badge when you cast your ballot. Links to candidate interviews are below.
Note: The election was delayed from its original start date on 19 May. See this Devel list thread for additional context.
Fedora Council
There is one seat open on the Fedora Council:
Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo)
There are four seats open on FESCo:
Mindshare Committee
There is one seat open on the Mindshare Committee:
Since I apparently haven’t completed the CLA (whatever that is), I’m not eligible to vote, so why did I receive the email that got me here, and how can I become eligible?
Ernie
The CLA is the Contributor License Agreement. You find it in your FAS
account. Log in on https://accounts.fedoraproject.org/ and search for
Fedora Project Contributor Agreement. After that you should be
eligible to vote.
Opening of the elections is announced publicly. AFAIK, it’s not send out
individually to people who are eligible. So, you most likely saw the
announcement and that’s what’s got you here.
The agreement is in the last tab of your account settings. Just in case searching, as suggested above, doesn’t give any results.
Thank you! I haave signed the CLA so now I should be able to vote!
Ernie
This is confusing, but just for the record here:
Fedora doesn’t havea “CLA” anymore — we don’t require any license agreement, and haven’t for over a decade. In 2010, the CLA was replaced with the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement, which is much more like the Developer Certificate of Origin. It’s there to make sure all contributions are under an acceptable-to-Fedora license, and provides for a default license where one isn’t already given.
Unfortunately, a lot of things — including code, and I think still a group in our account system — refer to “the CLA”, or “FCLA” or
cla_done
or similar.I filed an issue Issue #4806: It's time to bite the bullet and change occurances of "CLA" to "FPCA". - fedora-infrastructure - Pagure.io about this several years ago, and you can file the chain of well-intentioned “we’ll deal with this as part of this other ticket” links at the bottom of a series starting there to the point where it got dropped.
We probably should revive this effort, but it’s one of those things that’s hard to ever make top priority.
Thank you, Mathew for this clarification. I successfully worked the issue out, and I was able to cast my votes.
Names are far less important to me than user rights, and while I understand the need to make sure that all voters are members of the fedora Community, perhaps a better way to verify voter validity would be to check that the voter is a Community member, such as a registered, authentic user with a Fedora username and password in good standing (not ejected for cause, etc.).
Personally, I can see no valid reason why Fedora should require anything more than that a voter be a member of the Fedora Community. It should be the Community as a whole who select their leadership, and while this may effectively be the case currently, if a Community member is simply a user, and not a member of any group, or who does not yet provide contributions of any sort (e.g.: a new Fedora user/Community Member), why should that user be required to sign the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement to have the right to vote? That may be a way to get users to sign the agreement, but it may also prevent some users from exercising what should be their right as Community Members because they consider it too much bother, or too much to ask. As a case in point, I had to post a response here to find out how to sign the CLA/agreement to be allowed to vote. Having contributors sign the agreement can be more fairly accomplished by requiring that a user sign it when (s)he joins a group, or submits his/her first contribution.
My2Cents,
Ernie
Fedora is not a country — it is a voluntary association of individuals working towards a common goal. Voting for committee and Council members isn’t a general right. It is a way to allow the community to select representatives on different teams. The requirement (to have signed the CLA and also be a member of at least one Fedora group or team) seems like a reasonable minimum to me.
If it is “too much to ask” or “too much bother” for someone, it seems unlikely that that someone would be involved enough that they should have a voice in the decision.
By contrast, when we do the annual Fedora Survey, we open that to everyone, and don’t even require a Fedora account. Different goal, different practice.
I’m sorry if I sounded too critical. I was simply stating my opinion. I agree that there should be some minimal requirement to be permitted to vote for community leadership. I simply believe that the only requirement should be that a user care enough to join the Fedora community by setting up a Fedora account (a community member should have a Fedora user name and password). That is my definition of a community member (right or wrong), and I believe that all Fedora community members should have the right to vote for their community leaders.
With that said, I have no real problem with signing the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement (I’m not a member of any group yet - I’m relatively new to Fedora). I do, however have an issue with the fact that there was no information provided in the notification telling me how I can qualify to vote. Additionally, since the agreement/contract I was required to sign is a contributor agreement (and I’m not yet a contributor), that was a bit confusing too, but all-in-all, I am happy to meet the project’s requirements for the right to act as a responsible community member, and I would also want my opinions to be herd and considered whether they become policy or not. Those decisions are best resolved by the community at large.
My2Cents,
Ernie
I agree, we should make that more clear. We’ll keep that in mind for next time.
Thank you. That should help those who follow.