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
----
== 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 requires that either four members (e.g. 
the majority) agree on it or the majority of votes wins, in case all 
members voted, but some abstained with a vote for either side. 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 to FESCo. They will 
get discussed in FESCo meetings if necessary; FESCo can veto things that 
got decided in the FESCo-meeting that follows the public summary by at 
least 24 hours. That's similar to how FESCo can veto issues decide upon 
by the Packaging Committee; the "at least 24 hours" delay makes sure the 
FESCo members have enough time to look into a issue before discussing it.

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

Besides the general discussions that normally happens before voting's 
the EPEL Steering Committee will normally announce controversial or 
bigger voting's at least 24 hours before the voting-meeting on the list 
to make sure all people can send in their opinions before the meeting. 
Note that a lot smaller things will get decided without announcement 
beforehand, to make sure things are moving and to avoid to much 
bureaucracy; but everything of course can get revisited even after the 
meeting if there is a need to. The Steering Committee members will 
probably also use the wiki or the mailing list more often for votings 
than for example FESCo does.

----
End of proposal

(side note: the text can be found in the wiki at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ThorstenLeemhuis/EPELSteeringCommittee )

Note: This was discussed a bit on epel-devel-list already; see
https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2007-March/msg00360.html
for details and some things that got changed in between.

I'll send it to FESCo for discussions and ratifying when we agree 
roughly that this is the route to take. Probably for this Thursdays 
meeting already -- but that depends on how this discussions evolves.

CU
thl