Council Meetings

Fedora Council Meetings

The Fedora Council holds meetings every other week. They're held in the #fedora-meeting channel on Freenode. These meetings have two components: an Open Floor section where the agenda is set by attendees at the beginning of the hour, and a Tickets and Ongoing section where the Fedora Program Manager goes through crucial open tickets to make sure each gets attention. We don't want to be entirely ticket-driven (since that's a reactive process), but this helps keep important issues from slipping through the cracks.

You can see our upcoming meeting schedule in Fedocal.

Council Meeting Process

This guide explains how to manage and run a Council IRC meeting. Many of the steps here could well apply to other groups that hold regular IRC meetings as well.

Pre-meeting

1. Go through open tickets and select several that seem timely or otherwise worth real-time discussion.This is also a good time to poke forward any issues that don't really need to be at the meeting but need further action, or to close issues that are resolved — or which won't be resolved. We want to keep the open tickets reflective of actual work in progress, not merely things we hope to get to someday. (Ticket system or not, there's an infinite pool of potential work for the Council, and keeping open tickets which we have no practical plan to work on is a recipe for sadness all around.)

2. Consider other topics that might benefit from real-time discussion in order to move forward. Again, we don't want to block issues on waiting for "everyone in the room" conversations (when we have mailing lists and lazy consensus), but we've found that regular discussion is important.

3. An automated calendar message should appear on council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org list the day before the meeting. Reply to this message with the following template:

 
Subject: Schedule for the Fedora Council Meeting (2024-04-25)

 
The Fedora Council will hold our regular meeting at
1:00pm US/Eastern in #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net.
All are welcome!

To convert to your local time, run:

  TZ=US/Eastern date -d '1pm 2024-04-25'


Expected discussion items include:


YOUR AGENDA ITEMS HERE


If you would like to add something to this agenda, you can reply to
this email, e-mail me directly, file a new ticket at
https://pagure.io/Fedora-Council/tickets/issues, or if time permits,
bring it up at the end of the meeting, during the open floor topic.
Note that added topics may be deferred until the following meeting.

During the Meeting

You can copy and paste in lines from this template as the meeting proceeds. You may find it helpful to copy this to a file in advance, so you can pre-fill the topic lines.

 
#startmeeting Council (2024-04-25)
#meetingname council
#chair jwf riecatnor dcantrell dgilmore mattdm x3mboy bookwar bcotton pbrobinson asamalik
#topic Introductions, Welcomes
#topic Today's Agenda
(paste agenda from previous email)
#topic first topic...
#topic next topic...
...
#topic Open Floor
#endmeeting

1. Use the lines up through 'Introductions, Welcomes' to start the meeting.

2. Wait for a majority of the Council to show up.

3. Set the agenda — include the tickets from the FPgM, and then use the open floor meeting agenda process:

• Ask for topics
• Gauge popularity, sort topics
• Ask if everyone is okay with the sorted list

4. We've found that our meetings and discussions are small and informal enough that we don't need special etiquette markers (like ! to ask for permission to talk). If we ever do have a particularly contentious and popular topic, we may introduce rules like that temporarily — but, usually, it's just not necessary.

5. Keep an eye on the clock — if a topic is using more than the expected time, sometimes that's okay, and other times it's best to ask that discussion continue in tickets and on the mailing list and move on.

6. Make liberal use of Zodbot commands like #topic, #info, and #help, to populate the meeting minutes.

Post meeting (Tickets and Ongoing)

1. The meeting minutes are automatically collected in Møte and emailed to meetingminutes. It might be nice to find this and also mail it to the list. (Ideally, we'd enhance meetbot to automatically send these minutes to the appropriate list. #help, please!)

2. Process through tickets comment/close them as appropriate.

3. If you have any action items you can handle quickly, now is really a good time for it. Otherwise, don't forget to add these to your personal todo list.