CWG Recharter Strawman

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Thu Aug 30 17:13:04 UTC 2012


Following up on my action item from the IRC Board Meeting, here's a proposal
for a new Community Working Group Charter.

Note that this is just a strawman at this point -- other Board members
haven't reviewed this.  There's definitely room for people on this list to
have other ideas incorporated here.

The last paragraph of the Mission and duties section is the direction that
I'm working towards in this proposal so I can try to incorporate anything
that supports this.  If you'd like to work towards a different overall goal,
it might be better to provide an alternate proposal instead.

= Community Working Group =

== Mission and duties ==

The mission of the CWG is to make the environment within the Fedora Project a
more pleasant place by helping contributors to communicate better with each
other.

Specific duties of the Community Working Group may include:

* Serving as mediators[1]_ to facilitate a discussion between two parties
* Defusing tensions in a situation by helping to clarify ideas
* Helping to frame debates in terms of problems to be overcome to achieve a
goal
* Helping to make decisions address as many concerns as possible without
sacrificing their core value
* Alerting governance bodies that do enforcement of any conflicts that may have
escalated beyond the CWG's ability to defuse the situation.

Specific anti-duties of the Community Working Group:

* Playing the role of arbitrator[1]_ in a dispute
* Making judgements in a dispute

As a group, the Community Working Group seeks to provide people who are neutral
third parties to aid in communication, defusing tense situations, and keeping
conversations flowing along productive paths.

.. [1]_:: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitration -- the introduction has
          a description of the difference between mediation and arbitration

== Selection policy ==

The initial members of the CWG shall be chosen by the Board.  After the initial
bootstrapping, the Board envisions the CWG allowing others to join by showing
up to participate in the group.  The Board strongly believes that the CWG will
need to establish procedures and precedents for itself so that new members of
the group are given responsibilities gradually.  The current members of the
group should have the power to limit what issues new members are able to take
on in an official CWG capacity until they feel the new member has the necessary
skills to alleviate tensions and serve the needs of all sides of a dispute. 
How the CWG chooses to do this is up to the current members.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/attachments/20120830/581a0668/attachment.sig>


More information about the advisory-board mailing list