Meeting started at 2026-07-01 14:01:45 UTC

The Meeting name is 'Fedora Council Bi-Weekly Meeting'

!group council

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!hi

Peter Boy (ServerWG, Docs): Peter Boy (pboy)

I'm unfortunately afk for the moment but will try joining soon

!hi

Aoife Moloney: Aoife Moloney (amoloney)

!hi

!hi

bookwar: Aleksandra Fedorova (bookwar) - she / her / hers

!hi

Fabio Valentini 🌈: Fabio Valentini (decathorpe) - he / him / his

!hi

nimbinatus: Laura Santamaria (nimbinatus) - she / her / hers

(try that again)

As we wait for folks to come in, Ill add our agenda

- Discuss statement regarding standing down initiatives and the AI desktop propopsal https://hackmd.io/sA9A3B9dQnaacb9dNqEt4Q

- AOB

- Ticket tracker refinement

- Discuss ticket https://forge.fedoraproject.org/council/tickets/issues/569

The first two are last minute rememberings, apologies that they didnt get added to the agenda in advance

Is it possible to move forward with this request? I am still +1

As the initiative lead, I'm biased, but I'm also +1

if the requesters think it won't create confusion by extending the "Atomic" name from something that used to refer to "rpm-ostee based" to be more or an umbrella term, then that's fine with me

Happy to answer any questions that Timothée Ravier might not have answered in the thread on the ticket, or if any new ones come up

if the requesters think it won't create confusion by extending the "Atomic" name from something that used to refer to "rpm-ostee based" to be more of an umbrella term, then that's fine with me

If there are no -1, I believe this is fine for a lazy consensus vote (min of 3 +1's, no -1s after a week)

I would ask council members to please add your vote to the ticket if you have not done so

!hi

Justin Wheeler: Justin Wheeler (jflory7) - he / him / his

(related: is there documentation for council voting rules somewhere that I can read to get up to speed?)

It was more than a few 😕 But I'm here now!

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/council/#decisions

Fabio Valentini 🌈: ^^

+1 even though I am still not convinced this is/should be a Council ticket 😄

thank you - no significant objections or request to elevate to full concensis from me then ;)

thank you - no significant objections or request to elevate to full concensus from me then ;)

The Meeting Name is now council

Aoife Moloney: I added my +1 in the ticket as well

No objections here

excellent, that gives us the minimum. I will mark as approved after this meeting

Fabio Valentini 🌈: just so that you are not confused with all the status changes, you are the full member of the council, with your own vote, not just an observer.

We had this question before :)

bookwar: thank you for confirming, but yes, I am aware that the FESCo rep is supposed to be a full Council member :)

I commented with my vote in the ticket for tracking too

I really wanted this out ahead of Flock, buy hey ho

I really wanted this out ahead of Flock, but hey ho

anywhoo,

I thought the suspension of Initiatives was already announced publicly?

Just discussed, not officially announced

Didn't we put that up on discussion.fp.o before flock?

well, at least this part didn't happen

> We will be talking more about this proposal to retire the current Initiatives Process at Flock

No, I did bring it to everyone but I didnt get a clear answer that I could go ahead and post it

The HackMD was the post we wanted to get out before Flock, but didn't manage to happen

and then time is a b**ch so its now July :D

Something something cancel all international travel three weeks before Flock something something

I recall a devel-announce and/or Discussion post about this also

I think we should post the thing, because it is already public anyway

+1

But then should we have a follow-up ticket?

Yes, I would like to get an ack from council to go ahead and publish it. Just need to tidy wording to remove Flock

Oh, it is July!

🫣

So +1 from me to go ahead and publish it

what would this track?

+1 an ack from council to go ahead and publish it

+1 too

What we are actually going to do with intiatives

I would think we need something to update the wiki/docs?

Nothing, I think :D

Or is it included in the sndbox proposal?

+1 (assuming the paragraph that talks about flock being in the future is dropped)

I saw some FESCo discussion about sandbox yesterday?

Fabio Valentini 🌈: Do you have any context on that?

I was skimming yesterday's FESCo meeting

So this is not explicit in the sandbox proposal

(Not sure if I am taking things too far off-topic to ask the "what's next" question now, but I did see FESCo musing on Sandbox)

It maybe should be,

+1 on publish, +1 on a ticket about what to do long term instead

during open floor I asked other fesco members if there was anything that I should bring up at today's Council meeting, and the Sandbox proposal came up

Yes, a follow-up ticket is probably needed about the long-term replacement, since this is not (yet) being tracked as a ticket, I think?

Aha, OK, so not really a planned/scheduled conversation. But what did people have to say?

I can elaborate further later, but that doesn't really fit into the current !topic :)

Fair enough!

the question is - does it make sense tyo try to redefine initiaves while the sandbox proposal is being discussed?

The intent is to see if the sandbox idea is a potentially better mechanism, afaiui but its not very explicit. Rather, if you are involved in the conversations then you can reasonably assume thats what it will be for. Which, is not great. So we should definitely clarify that and a ticket to track it is fine

Then let's rally behind making the HackMD post, and then start a new ticket for the wider discussion of what's next?

the question is - does it make sense to try to redefine initiaves while the sandbox proposal is being discussed?

https://forge.fedoraproject.org/council/tickets/issues/564

I feel like having sandbox and initiatives discussion in parallel is going to be an overkill

I think the idea was (1) "Initiatives are not working, and we do not want anyone else to invest a significant amount of time planning new ones" and (2) "We are going to deprecate the old thing as our remit as Council, and figure out the new thing together with community consultation"

we have this, which is the sandbox propoal (I think?). Do we want to have this be the main one? Or something else?

Oh, hmmmm

I'd rather we discuss the Initiatives replacement in #564 to begin, since it is most related

I am not sure the Sandbox proposal as-is covers the non-engineering side of things sufficiently, but I think iterations are necessary in whatever comes next

ok well firstly, let me agree to the statement thing and then we can set a new topic on the sandbox/initiaives

I don't see sandbox as a replacement for initiatives

what is considered the main problem with the initiatives process? there was a Council communications issue w/ the AI desktop proposal, but I don't know that necessarily means the entire thing is inherently flawed

We either consider the sandbox proposal as a follow-up to redefining the initiatves. Or we should delay the discussion of the initiatives until after the sandbox proposal discussion reaches some conclusion. I don't think we can maintain both discussion threads in a way so that they do not overlap

I don't want to encourage people to spend a lot of time on new Initiatives though

I would like to announce the standing down of initiatives asap. Its not a thing anymore :(

It is hard to answer concisely in text. I think even Initiative Leads are confused about what Initiatives are really supposed to be. The pain point from the AI Developer Desktop was something that was not fully baked yet, as a lot of new innovation work is, was thrust into view as something people perceived as being an ultimate high priority for the entire project and community

Theres still a lot of coversation to be had about the sandbox stuff, so that will take some time. And we can redirect people to that conversation if they have questions about what might replace community initiatives to see if that fits or not. It doesnt have to, but thats something that we are actively looking at as a potential replacement I think

[@nimbinatus:matrix.org](https://matrix.to/#/@nimbinatus:matrix.org), [@pboy:fedora.im](https://matrix.to/#/@pboy:fedora.im), [@pbokoc:fedora.im](https://matrix.to/#/@pbokoc:fedora.im): I mean, how has your experience been, as Initiative leads?

So - announce that we put initiatives on hold, encourage people to focus on the sandbox discussion for now. Once we reach something with the sandbox discussion, come back to the question of initives retirement or evolution.

+1

I was writing the same thing @bookwar was :joy:

As an initiative lead, personally, I really think I'm there to grease the wheels. The whole thing to me is getting the right people in the right place to keep discussions going and activity moving. But I think my initiative is/was different than others in that it was a continuation of a research spike, for lack of a better term.

Maybe it would make sense to replace current Initiatives with a more lightweight long-term goal / planning mechanism (i.e. a collection of Change Proposals plus some box to put around them), and *not* be an incubation mechanism (that's what "Sandbox" would be for)?

So I'm not really sure I'm a good barometer on how it's going. I also was learning Fedora while running, kinda like building the plane while flying it...

Just as an remark: initiatives and sandbox cover different areas of topics. one is engineering, the other distribution.

that too

In effect, this is what we are aiming for I think, but per bookwar's suggestion, pausing new Initiatives, focusing on Sandbox, and then post-Initiatives after Sandbox

FWIW I have not gone into too much detail on Jef's proposal as its written _because_ it seems really heavy, so I think the idea is good, but the proposed implementation doesnt seem all that inviting

Initiatives supposedly cover both but I'd say with mixed success in trying to do both. But yes, something that biases too heavy for Changes risks pushing out non-engineering work

The current process was not enough detail, the sandbox proposal seems like an awful lot. Is there a goldilocks zone somewhere?

+1 this sentiment did come up in the FESCo discussion also

You are one of the best barometers because you're the one building that plane right now, and your perspective is way more fresh than many of us who have been here for a while!

I also want to make sure there's not too many processes to do the same thing (Change, Initiative, Sandbox, "just do it")

There's already a lot of confusion about the different Fedora governance bodies

So, to put initiatives into the frame of work that I think of when doing engineering, I kinda think of initiatives as epics. Collections of work that need to get done over multiple blocks of worktime, in this case releases.

So the initiative proposal I wrote was scoped to encompass two release cycles, to get work done in that timeframe.

I think one of the differences between current Initiatives and future Sandbox things would be that with an Initiative, the goal is (pretty much) clear at the outset, but with a Sandbox thing, more experimentation is possible before making things "official"?

A sandbox project is a *project*. Full scale, activity needed, far beyond a scope of work that's easy to frame.

`s/standards/community change frameworks/`

I wonder was Jef being ironic calling it 'a modest proposal' and then having it be the longest proposal in existence 🤣

It's a full group, if that makes sense

that's kinda how I've been thinking about it all

We discussed some time ago in this channel that future initiative might be just a self-managed concept. As in I have an idea which spans multiple changes, I want to store info about that idea in one place, initiative is how i call the place

No approvals, no votes, purely informational

But that's a future topic

he was, on purpose. It's from Jonathan Swift

Something that puts the Council as a gateway check at a later stage in the cycle instead of the earliest stage would also be nice, perhaps

excellent 🤣

(if that would be necessary for a self-managed project management tool at all?)

nimbinatus: I like your breakdown of how you think of epics vs projects

AKA, a SIG? 😅

no, SIG is a continuous thing, initiative is a SIGs project. Python SIG is a SIG, migration from Python 2 to Python 3 is a (never-ending) initiative

For that we don't need anything.

> We discussed some time ago in this channel that future initiative might be just a self-managed concept.

I think it matters on the "why" and "how" questions. I need to make an archive or better copy of this blog post, but this is an interesting read from super old Fedora governance times. https://iquaid.livejournal.com/20781.html

Reminds me of https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FinalizingFedoraSwitchtoPython3

I think if we can agree to the idea, that the project really would benefit from having an early <space> where support could be offered if needed, and success checks run, for people who have 'big' ideas for Fedora, then thats a great baseline to work from

I think the Rawhide gating was another example like that too, mhroncok ? If Im not mixing things up

my team just reported that we ported some tests from python 2 to python 3 last week, so it is a fresh topic for me. Sorry if I am triggering you with these examples :)

+1, this is the best agreement I think we can get to with the quorum we have today

I'm mindful we were going to do backlog triage too 🙂

I dont thin we are :D

3. Sandbox projects are proposals that could add to the world of Fedora in a significant way, with enough room to experiment and explore while people are getting used to how changes and initiatives work. It gives all of us a heads up that something new is coming to get proposed as a future path *someday*.

So, here's how I think of everything that's out there, and correct me if I'm wrong:

1. Changes are scoped to one release. They are one body of work that is strongly defined to handle a specific area of Fedora engineering. This is the realm of FESCo with input from Council should something turn into a strategic, group wide decision versus an engineering/tactical one.

2. Initiatives are containers for changes, plus design work, plus collaboration space across SIGs or working groups, with the intent to be scoped to a set of releases. Council approves these, but FESCo should be involved, and perhaps Mindshare depending on the scenario.

I dont think we are :D

Sandbox --> whatever the next step is is acknowledging that there *is* interest and legs to this idea, and that's been proven out, so now it needs to get molded into Fedora's world a bit. With more guardrails to follow

nimbinatus: I think those are great 2026 definitions 👍️

Frankly, as the person stepping into trying to figure out how/where Hummingbird fits in this world, I need the space to figure it out since I don't really have any change proposals, or scoped initiatives, or anything just yet. But we want to get there, and we want to participate, and we're just not sure how yet

that's why I like that sandbox idea

Personally I always struggled with: the change proposal is too small, people do not get why we are trying to do it -> i describe the possible benefits, which can be brought later by other changes -> the topic becomes too big, people say we need to do some small steps -> the small step again is to small so we can not see the immediate benefit. Having a way to link change to some series of changes which can explain the context better would be nice in such cases.

(this is pretty much what I meant to say with "a collection of Changes with some box around them")

I hate to say it, but maybe there is a world where initiatives are in fact not ded 😅 But perhaps they were missing that sandbox-type starting point

Im not convinced that Initiatived failed, but I will make my point in the Discussion thread.

Im not convinced that Initiatives failed, but I will make my point in the Discussion thread.

In any event the way community initiatives are structured now is broken, so that process is being retired

We can say to pause them for now, but there is no commitment to putting them out back just yet 😛

Giving us the freedom to retire or evolve later is nice, yeah

maybe what comes out of the discussion is a better understanding of how the community needs an initiative process to behave, and that might include having a sandbox space as a first entry point

Given that they’re broken, they’ve still achieved a great deal.

For sure, it is no disrespect on Initiative Leads. There is some high-impact work that has come through this process. The challenging part is that Initiative Leads ultimately have a lot of independence to map things out and get support as Initiatives from the wider Council.

i think the core issue still was that initiaves were supposed to happen within the project, and recent discussions forced us to step outside into teh space of dealing with third-parties. And this is a significant difference which created set of issues with which we just do not have enough experience yet. So we are laerning as we go

they have, and, WARNING: Controversial statement: the biggest issue with that from what I can see is that it looks like if you dont have someone 'inside' backing your initiative idea early, you dont get it approved

We were essentially ignoring Remixes for years. We knew they existed, but we neve officially interacted with them, so we are a bit outside of our usual operation mode

Did the forge project deal with third parties??

they way it dealt with them is - it said no third-parties :)

they way it dealt with them is - it said "no third-parties allowed" :)

What do you mean by third parties? Im not following that :(

Like Nvidia

ah ok

Aoife Moloney: people who use Fedora comtent but do something completely different with it

thank you :)

Amazon Linux, Bazzite, Hummingbird,..

:bows in thanks:

Yikes, were at 5 mins to go!

once again my scheme of tricking you all to a board refinement meeting as failed

should we try async refinement in chat?

yeah, we can definitely 'try' :D

not now, but Friday or next week :)

ok on the the topic of sandbox/initiatives, where are we as council with that concept?

lol, not Friday! US holiday so I for one will not be online :p

Id like to close out the topic for the minutes with a little one-liner

but I will happily help with board refinement as needed

"Publish that we're on hold, discussions continuing on sandbox and the future of initiatives"

or something?

or maybe add "we acknowledge that perhaps we're not completely done with initiatives, but we need to rescope them"

!proposal The council will announce that we will be putting the community initiatives on hold indefinitely, but we encourage people to focus on the sandbox discussion for now. Once we reach something with the sandbox discussion, the council intends to come back to the question of whether we need to have a community initiatives process retirement or evolution.

+1

^^ This is bookwar 's statement from earlier with a few more words because I thought it was excellent

ack

+1

It's not what we discussed the last minutes.

It feels this way to me, but we need to spend more time than we had today discussing the shape of what is coming next

I don't think we are locking in a lifetime commitment here yet, but we need some short-term direction

Peter Boy (ServerWG, Docs): I take my hat off to you sir if you have been able to keep track of what we were discussing the last few mins because I got a little lost 😅

a agreeable wording was: Publish that we're on hold, discussions continuing on sandbox and the future of initiatives

We need to mve from here now, can we take this over to #council:fedoraproject.org ? I dont want Michel Lind ☘ UTC+1 ⏱️ to hunt us out of the room again :D