This post shares two new proposals for changes to Fedora Council policy.

Policy changes

While addressing another issue recently, the Fedora Council realized we don’t have a good policy for making changes to Council policies. That seems like a mistake we should fix. So I have submitted a pull request to the Council Docs repo that lays out a policy:

Proposed changes to Fedora Council policies must be publicly announced on the council-discuss mailing list and in a Fedora Community Blog post in order to get feedback from the community. After a minimum of two calendar weeks, the Council may vote on the proposed change using the full consensus voting model. After approval, the change is reflected on the Council policies page.

The intention is to make policy changes transparent and allow for community feedback.

Channel bans

In addition, we realized that we don’t have an explicit policy about issuing bans in channels for persistent off-topic conversation. We want to give teams within Fedora autonomy to act on their own within the boundaries of our Four Foundations and community norms.

The Council developed a policy proposal that allows channel operators to ban individuals for persistent off-topic posting but makes it clear that the ban should only apply to affected channels:

Teams within Fedora have the freedom to decide what is on- and off-topic for their fora (IRC channel, mailing list, Telegram channel, et cetera). Moderators may ban participants for repeatedly engaging in off-topic discussion, however they must file a ticket with the Council’s Code of Conduct issue tracker to report the ban. Bans for being off-topic in one channel may not be extended to other channels unless the behavior is displayed in that channel as well. In this case, each ban should be treated as a separate issue with its own ticket. Community members who wish to appeal the ban may file a ticket with the Council.

To be clear, this is not intended for conduct that violates our Code of Conduct.

Feedback welcome

The Fedora Council wants community input. Please provide questions or comments in the Pagure pull requests:

These will be submitted for a Council vote on Monday, 1 April.