Meeting started at 2026-03-26 16:30:18 UTC

The Meeting name is 'fedora-ai-ml-sig'

!hi

Gordon Messmer (gordonmessmer)

!hi

Tim Flink (tflink)

!hi

Alexander Lent (xanderlent) - he / him / his

!hi

Justin Wheeler (jflory7) - he / him / his

I know Dominik Kawka is likely away. I _think_ Carol Chen might be around but I know it is late in her TZ

do we have enough of the right folks to be discussing the topics you wanted to bring up?

Maybe? Mostly I wanted to follow-up on the discussion, and put some more thoughts out there.

!hi

Carol Chen (cybette) - she / her / hers

those are the only topics we have for today

But I didn't want this to be prioritized before routine business that y'all have 🙂

Ah!

Ooh, the pressure 😛

I'll try to focus, have another meeting going on at the same time 😆

So, if it is just these topics, I guess there are these two things that Carol Chen and I was hoping to discuss with y'all:

Hey Carol Chen, no worries!

1. Topic 1: The naming / structure / governance topic

2. Topic 2: Brainstorming about useful SIG activities for an intern, circa May 2026

I can chair those two topics, if helpful?

I'm not going to fight you for them :)

Heheh

Alright. Not sure if there is any other business first, or if we should just leap right in?

go for it, there were no other topics today

Oh, I see Tim just commented an hour ago 😄 Let me catch up really quick 👀

I didn't really add anything new, to be honest

Well, it is a useful add for me 🙂

My #1 concern has been that I don't want this to be a distraction from the important packaging work y'all are actually doing

I have some thoughts on how this could work, but it is under-developed

we do have a separate ROCm packaging sig for that work, not sure how much the other groups have been used so far

it's just been managed as one larger group for conveninence

Maybe it feels boring, but even if so, I think it is worthwhile to discuss it, because I only see more people crowding into this namespace over time. And I'd prefer if they could crowd in together with us instead of forging their own path 🙂

My loose idea was a larger umbrella "AI Working Group", which would basically own and use the `/ai/` namespace as a team/group wherever possible. So, it gives us a better brand, identity, and recognition. And plus, two letters are easy to type in URLs.

Underneath that, we could have sub-teams or SIGs or whatever other name, focused on specific things. We _could_ keep the AI/ML SIG as a packaging-focused team, or it could be the ROCm SIG. Or whatever else makes sense. I don't know there, but I defer what makes sense to accurately describe hardware enablement with an AI bend for GPUs

I think for where I'd like to contribute more is building some more community spaces for people to speak up and share about AI in Fedora

That ties in partially to packaging, but also beyond. And maybe there could be other, more narrow, focused "teams" or SIGs or underneath an AI WG umbrella.

Not sure if any of this makes sense.

Or if I am making things more confusing… 🙂

that's not far off of what we've actually been doing, to be honest. just with a different name

personally, I don't care a whole lot but I don't have the cycles right now to be helping with much of it and we've had a lot of churn with groups and naming lately

It fascinates me how people will describe SIGs and WGs, even though, AFAIK, we do not have any _official_ documentation for either

(Quick aside! I wanted to introduce my _current_ intern, Ananya Nalavathu, who is hanging out and reading in on the chat. She is getting up to speed on Fedora at the moment but I asked her to hang out here and see about the topics we are discussing today!)

I don't think we even have packaging activity tied to the ai-ml sig, we created the ai-packagers-sig for that IIRC

I am one of the folks who feel an attachment to AI/ML but it's true that namer is increasingly only used by academics for what the public knows as "AI", so maybe the rebrand is a good fit - I'm happy to comment in the issue if that's better.

Yeah, I get going with the trend for having a broader AI working group and keeping the HW enablement as SIGs organized around specific programs or HW stacks.

Ananya Nalavathu: You can write a 1-2 sentence intro for folks in the chat so they can get to know you better too.

Interesting

The only activity in that seems to be in the COPR group; we set up anther one to mirror the ai-packagers-sig

sounds like there are several of us in the boat of "ml vs ai" :)

but I've more or less given up on the naming fight there. I've died on hills like that in the past and don't have the energy to do so again

Alexander Lent: Thanks for sharing. Yes, a comment on the issue would be helpful too, just to make sure we have tracked, recorded feedback too. (I guess technically this meeting is tracked too, but I have a hard time remembering my breakfast, let alone what I said in a meeting yesterday 😄)

I've seen quite a bit of documentation around SIGs. Not so much about WGs. I know some WGs exist, but no real idea what differentiates them from SIGs in Fedora.

Seconding this - I've really only worked with SIGs

I'm not super invested in the naming and structure of things (long time Fedora user, but mostly involved in projects adjacent to Fedora). I just think it's important for people who wants to participate in AI/ML related stuff to know where to go, e.g. those interested in ROCm packaging -> here; those interested in AI tools and frameworks -> there. Etc. Clear signposts.

yeah, that makes sense

If there is a way to respectfully apply the ML term into our work, I think we can. But for the larger umbrella WG, I think just "AI" is something people will be able to latch into more easily. I am thinking of new talent and recent graduates, and how these folks are being oriented in their academic studies

to be honest, we haven't had enough folks working on things so far to justify that extra work

Hey Guys! I am Ananya Nalavathu.. I'm currently pursuing my MSc in Management and Marketing at UCC (Ireland) . I will be working as a Community Architect Intern in OSAIPO.. Looking forward to working with you all in upcoming weeks and get to know each other along : )

when there are <10 people participating, the signposts are just extra work :-D

Heh. Ask three people and you might get five different answers. The quick answer is, WGs have some more structure, formality, and governance around them. I think almost always, WGs are tied to Fedora Editions, which do have more clear guidelines:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/council/policy/edition-promotion-policy/

But we are not producing a Fedora Edition

🎉😎🥳

We *could* produce an AI Lab from the WG, not quite an Edition but I know that is a stated goal already

Let's make a really big packaging sign post, and then have a clear redirect for "everything else" 🙂

poking around at an immutable spin for ai-ml and ROCm stuff has been on my todo list but priorities :(

Counterpoint: there is a very vocal anti-AI community and maintaining the broader "AI/ML" branding communicates the intent to support work that doesn't fall into the specific category of their objections

I think the packaging side of things is what is best represented as "stable" work in this group, so that work should be protected and be insulated from unnecessary change as much as possible

Right, but I think this is looking ahead to where there will be more people participating :)

One of my primary motivations is to make more of a space for people who want to do AI things to feel like there is a space to show up, do things, and hopefully help out too

I have a suspicion that many of the folks who are vocally anti-AI are not going to be swayed by the /ML part

but I could be wrong

We could produce a Lab, I think Gordon Messmer is even looking into that already, but an Edition is a much bigger scope of work 🙂 It blocks the entire Fedora release process if we fail to build!

IIRC, you're supposed to have a lab before creating an edition

but there are plenty of process things like that which have been more or less ignored lately

Yeah, I think that ship has said w.r.t. the Anti-AI crowd already forming opinions of the Fedora Project's direction. :/

This is something I would like to make space for, but I think it might not be clear there is space for that right now. It's cool if you work on it, but cool if someone else shows up with a passionate itch to scratch 🙂

that feels reflective of the larger conversations around AI as well

I guess it is not officially a requirement, but yeah, hard to imagine it happening any other way 🙂

You could ignore it but getting an Edition off the ground without building any ISOs in community for at least a release cycle seems… unwise

Ah, thanks, that Lab effort is what I was referring to - having a "product of the WG" with all the various SIG packages included would be a organizational capstone and would help create milestones for planning between the hardware and sofware support groups. I'll try and put this in my ticket comment later...

Haters gonna hate. And while I do think some AI hate is valid, justifiable, and can be addressed in our implementation… some people will also just never, ever be happy. And that's OK.

I don't think that "we work on AI" will attract people that "we work on AI and ML" won't.

I think that "we work on AI and ML" supports community building vs "we work on AI."

so... I don't think "we work on AI" is advantageous.

I think we need to hold true to our values as a project and community (Freedom, Friends, Features, First) and keep that as a compass for how we answer the equation of "Fedora" + "AI" = ?

It is a good thing to keep in mind, agreed

If AI/ML Working Group is better, then that is fine for me – but I do have a subtle motivation of wanting to claim the `/ai/` namespace with this group before someone else does

Let's not say anything too specific here, but from my vantage point, I see several competing interests, some better represented upstream than others, who might see an unclaimed namespace as an opportunity

I mean… we even have an AI blog now, apparently?

I forget where I saw that, I think Máirín helped get it spun up, but I forget the details

I should find that... I'd like to start contributing blogs, but one of the pre-reqs is a 3 hour writing course. -_-

Is it possible to have multiple namespaces? so /ai/ redirects to canonical /ai-ml/ perhaps?

I think internally at RH, but not in community 🙂

Hmmm, web redirects are a thing, I guess.

I guess my stance is, I am less particular about the name. I like AI WG, but I am not married to that. What I really want is two distinct things: (1) a larger AI-focused umbrella which includes but is it not limited to packaging, and (2) a clear off-shoot from the WG where the ROCm/PyTorch/other packaging work takes place

Or that is my current take, at least.

Also, if it was not already clear, I could take some of the ownership for executing any name changes, both in getting a Fedora Docs site set up, the Wiki pages, and also our Fedora Forge presence

It's my understanding that this is already the current permission structure with all of the underlying SIGs (each of which has different packagers in it); we just have a single channel/wiki/ticket tracker/meeting for bureaucracy reduction.

I could probably tag-team with Carol Chen and Dominik a bit on that, to be honest 🙂 But yeah, not wanting to leap in on anything until we reach consensus

I don't think there have been any big objections other than the concerns about dropping ml from the name

I'm just wondering how disruptive it would be if I wanted to do something like, organize a project showcase meeting for Fedora contributors who are building AI apps and tools in the community

I am in a brainstorming mode right now, but I want to spend some more time doing things such as this

But I don't want to rock the boat too much and disrupt what y'all have going on here too

Hm, yeah, I see your point. It might make sense to have a more general AI chat or AI users chat for this sort of thing and to separate out the packaging work.

And that's where having the working group as an umbrella would come in, I see.

Right!

Some of y'all may have already noticed the abundance of newcomer introductions in #ai-ml:fedoraproject.org the other day

This was just because we had an Outreachy internship with "AI" in the name 😅

I swear we did not deliberately direct anyone to the team room but they come anyways because of the name 😄

I'm still of the mind that we can do that if/when the traffic becomes a problem. I do think we still have quite a ways before we get to that point

I'm with tflink: The general traffic in our existing chat room is not a burden at this point.

At least speaking for myself

If we keep everything as-is, as long as it is not going to be okay and not a distraction to have a lot of new people coming in with AI interests but not in packaging, then it is okay for me

It is low-traffic right now, but I hope to spend some time on visibility, outreach, and engagement

If we keep everything as-is, as long as it is going to be okay and not a distraction to have a lot of new people coming in with AI interests but not in packaging, then it is okay for me

I suspect that the folks who have been working on packaging so far have been around long enough to be able to tune-out/ignore noise :)

OK. As long as it doesn't end up drowning y'all out 😉

if that happens, we can figure out what to move where at that time

I am initiating things this way first, because I want to be respectful of y'all being in this space first and setting up the flags.

I don't know what will happen once we put some more juice into this. It could be a dud, or we could end up getting a lot of new traffic.

that was always the vague plan in my mind - expand when needed, keep admin work to a minimum otherwise

Governance problems are easiest to solve before you have them 😄

I'm happy to help out with this admin work BTW. I think Carol Chen might too, but I won't speak for her and her capacity 🙂

Anyways, this is my proposal I guess, so I don't feel qualified to vote on my own idea 😄 But I'll happily defer to the path that y'all think is best, as long as it will be fine for me to camp out in the existing spaces and invite more folks in for things beyond packaging work.

I'll try and recruit for packaging and hardware enablement too, of course 😄

Oh, and initiate a Fedora Docs site for this effort 🙂

Errr. Finish what was started

https://forge.fedoraproject.org/ai-ml/docs

I'll be happy to help

Thanks. I think attending this meeting gave me a much better idea of what is going on with names/Branding/WH setup, etc

I'm glad it helped! 🙌

Did we reach a consensus though?

I do suppose if we keep "AI/ML", I would still prefer to use the "Working Group" moniker, so more focused things could be SIGs or WG teams or whatever other sub-structure we want to have

Later down the road, whenever the need to differentiate does emerge

other than the conversation around AI vs AI/ML, I don't think there were disagreements

and I think that comes down to you and gordon

Gordon Messmer: What say you?

sounds good. I have a 10:30 meeting that I need to run to.

we are pretty much out of time

OK!

Let me write one last—

~ fin ~

Didn't talk about the intern topic this time, but that's okay, it is not urgent yet 🙂

yeah as long as we get to it sometime before May :)

I got confused about who's charing the meeting, sorry

if there is nothing else on this, moving on to

Oh! 😄

Heheh, sorry

I got confused too

is there anything else to bring up today?

that hasn't already been tabled for later

I got my big topic in 🙂

And somehow consumed an hour 👀

just that

anyhow, we're over time so we'll be done

thanks for coming, everyone