Proposal for a EPEL Steering Committee

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Hi all!

The initial goal of the EPEL SIG was to have some kind of "work in the
open, announce potential controversial topics in public before you
realize them, and as long as nobody yells everything is fine and
everyone glad" kind of organization. Well, seems at some EPEL-SIG
members seems unhappy with that and strongly urged on the
epel-devel-list to form some kind of government body. So I wrote
something up, which you can find below.

Start of proposal
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== EPEL Steering Committee ==

An EPEL Steering Committee will be formed as government body for EPEL.
It will consist of seven members. The initial committee will be filled
with the first seven EPEL SIG members that are also those that invested
most of the time and work for the EPEL idea until now. That includes
these people: Dennis Gilmore, Mike McGrath, Michael Stahnke, Kevin
Fenzi, Thorsten Leemhuis, Karsten Wade and Axel Thimm (those people can
appoint different members if they don't want to be in the committee).
They will take care of EPEL until 30.09.2007. Then then a new committee
will be formed; FESCo and the EPEL Steering Committee until then will
work out how this committee will get constituted; a mix of appointed and
elected members is likely.

The EPEL Steering Committee will continue to report to FESCo and will
continue to be a SIG that is below FESCo in the project hierarchy.

The EPEL Steering Committee will work similar how FESCo works; that means:

 * things normally get discusses and decided in open-to-all IRC
meetings; members can send in their vote via mail/wiki if they can make
the meeting. Approving something require at least four Steering
Committee members to vote and the majority of the votes wins. But the
goal remains to have a consensus between Committee members normally

 * important things get discussed on the list before they get voted upon
and the goal it to find a consensus that seems to be fine for the
majority of people involved

 * meeting summaries get send to the list, wiki and will get discussed
in FESCo meetings in necessary

 * each point that receives strong opposition on the list after it got
decided will get revisited once in the next meeting if someone asks for it

The EPEL Steering Committee won't handle issues around theoretical
Packaging (e.g. everything around writing specfiles) -- the Packaging
Committee will take care of this for EPEL, too. Practical packaging (for
example: maintenance  and update policy for EPEL) on the other hand is
regulated by the EPEL Steering Committee.

The goal is to let the EPEL Steering Committee work on it's own (e.g.
without FESCo involvement) for all things that are specific to EPEL.
Sometimes it might be necessary to solve issues hand in hand with FESCo
or other SIGs. For example:

 * where the EPEL steering committee can't agree with another committee
that is on the same hierarchy level in the Fedora Project (say the
Packaging Committee).

 * when FESCo member reads what the EPEL Steering Committee decided and
disagrees with that

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End of proposal

Note: I'll send it to Fedora-maintainers after initial discussion on
this list. Later to FESCo for ratifying when we agree roughly that this
is the route to take.

CU
thl

P.S.: The proposal is also in the wiki at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ThorstenLeemhuis/EPELSteeringCommittee