Re: A Community Change process to mirror the System Change process

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On 4/1/20 8:40 AM, Ben Cotton wrote:
> Ankur opened this ticket[1], but I want to bring the discussion to the
> mailing list because I think that's a better venue for open
> discussion.
>
> [1] https://pagure.io/Fedora-Council/tickets/issue/291
>
> My initial response:
> The biggest question I have is "where is the whole community"? There's
> not a good way to reach everyone (assuming we even have a good
> definition of what "everyone" means, which I'd argue we don't).
>
> I think the bigger problem is people not paying attention to the
> broader community. I get this; many of us are volunteers and we only
> have so much time that we can devote. I'm not sure adding process gets
> us much value here until we have a better way of getting the message
> out.
>

Without riffing on details, I think a Community Change process is a good
idea for the following reasons:

1. Create a parallel to established development processes
2. Gives "permission" to volunteers who often have imposter syndrome

First, it creates a parallel with the more established development
processes of the Fedora community. The community side of Fedora (in my
view) has always been improvised. This could build more structure and
order into something that has always been mildly chaotic.

Second, it also addresses the catch-22 that volunteers often fall into,
where they need "permission" (or a gentle nudge) to become empowered to
push forward a change that affects other Fedorans in the community. As
someone who has spent all of my time in Fedora as a volunteer, this
makes a lot of sense to me.

To counter one point, I think we have become much more effective at
"getting the message out" over the last five years than we have before.
Some of this is a centralized process like the CommBlog, but a lot of
what I've seen change over the years is a shift towards
decentralization, like forwarding messages across mailing lists,
forwarding Telegram messages across multiple groups, etc. For a
community the size of Fedora, I don't think we can rely on a centralized
metric to evaluate whether we are "getting the message out" effectively
or not. Focusing on messaging right *now* adds significant stop energy
to the conversation. Not that it doesn't deserve more focus later, but
we can't know what works unless we try something first. :-) After all,
we are pretty good at being First with a lot of things in Fedora.

--
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory (he/him)
justinwflory.com
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