[Ambassadors] fedora council: heads up, ambassadors :)

[Matthew Miller]

Hi everyone. The proposal for a new Fedora Council, replacing the Fedora
Project Board, is on its way to passing.

See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MatthewMiller/council-draft for the
complete proposal. One important aspect of this is an "Outreach
Representative", which we've asked to be selected by FAmSCo. From the
document:

  "Engineering" and "Outreach" are broad areas roughly encompassing two of
  the major areas of activity in Fedora. Engineering is the technical work
  related to building and releasing the Fedora operating system and the
  infrastructure related to that. Outreach includes marketing, support, and
  Fedora Ambassadors — largely activities that happen between Fedora and the
  world at large, with the distribution release cycle serving as a fuel
  source, not the thing that's being worked on.

  The engineering and outreach representatives' responsibility is to
  represent their areas collectively, not to be just an individual voice that
  happens to be voted-in by some subset of Fedora. They are selected by the
  people active in those areas, coordinated by the Fedora Engineering Steering
  Committee (FESCo) and the Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee (FAmSCo)
  respectively, and serve for terms to be determined by those committees.


Once the board ticket for voting on this is officially closed, we'll file a
FAmSCo ticket about this, but I wanted to get the conversation started
without more delay (since I don't expect it to be resolved immediately).

One particular thing of note is that Outreach is much larger in scope than
Ambassadors has traditionally been defined. This doesn't mean we're putting
those other areas of under the _rule_ of the ambassadors' steering
committee, but we would like someone who can also help _represent_ those
concerns and act as a bridge. I was particuarly struck by Christoph
Wickert's "Advocating Fedora.next talk at Flock *, where he talked about
getting the project message down into the on-the-ground ambassadors and out,
and I've had talks with others (hi there, Andrew!) about how disconnected
it can feel right now, so hopefully this will help.  And not just in one
direction — this is an important conduit for getting real-world feedback and
user experience back into the project.

We didn't discuss this in much depth on the Board, but a further idea worth
considering is expanding FAmSCo into a Fedora Outreach Steering Committee,
explicitly embracing and including all of project outreach. (Or creating a
new such committee with FAmSCo below that, but I don't think _more_
committees is necesssarily a good thing.) This would help keep the
cross-group burden from just being on one person. What do you all think?



* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2O1bMT5a5Y&t=75



-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader