#253 ๐Ÿ“ docs(council): Rewrite Community Architect charter
Opened by jflory7. Modified
Fedora-Council/ jflory7/council-docs change/fca-rewrite  into  main

This commit is a complete rewrite of the Fedora Community Architect (FCA) charter page to better reflect core responsibilities. The Community Architect role was often misinterpreted as a broad "Community Manager" role, while the actual focus is on the stewardship of key project resources: the Fedora budget, the Flock contributor conference, and Fedora Council documentation. This change clarifies the role's priorities and aligns it with performance expectations.

The core motivation was to move beyond abstract statements and define the specific actions, accountabilities, and guiding principles of the FCA. This was achieved by systematically expanding each section to reflect the practical, day-to-day realities of the work.

Key changes include:

  • Decision-Making & Guiding Principles:
    • Clarified the FCA's role as a bridge between Red Hat's interests and the community's health, explicitly acknowledging the sponsorship bias while establishing the Four Foundations as the primary ethical framework for decisions.
  • Roles & Responsibilities:
    • Budget Management: Expanded to detail the full lifecycle of the role's financial duties, from strategic forecasting and proposal development to negotiation with OSPO and ongoing accounting. Explicitly added the FCA's permanent position as Chair of the Mindshare Committee.
    • Flock Conference: Rewritten to be action-oriented, defining the FCA's duties in data analysis, venue selection, committee leadership, and overall project management.
    • CommOps Collaboration: Redefined the relationship to reflect the FCA's designed role as the primary leader and strategic advocate for the CommOps team, specifying responsibilities in both community enablement and analytics.
    • Code of Conduct Chair: Detailed the specific duties of the chair, including facilitating meetings, acting as a liaison for new cases, coordinating transparency reports, and maintaining the Committee's official documentation.
  • Communication:
    • Overhauled the section to reflect the FCA's role as a project-wide communication hub, moving beyond a narrow focus on the Council.
    • Outlined the primary stakeholder teams (Mindshare, DEI, CommOps, etc.) and the purpose of the FCA's communication with each.
    • Specified the FCA's responsibility for proactive public communication through blogs, forums, and other channels.

A full-length screenshot of a dark-themed Fedora Docs page presenting the revised charter for the Fedora Community Architect (FCA). The document provides a comprehensive overview of the role, with sections detailing "Roles and Responsibilities" (like community health and mentorship), "Meetings," "Decision-Making," the "Hiring Process," "Communication" channels, and a list of "Previous Fedora Community Architects."

My target timeline to merge this Pull Request is on Thursday, July 3rd, before the Friday US Holiday.

Well one thing I support is the FCA getting a chunk of money at the beginning of the financial year and then being responsible for dispersing it.

This was the first time OSPO was mentioned and the abbreviation was expanded.

Now the first time OSPO is mentioned, it's abbreviated only, until later in the text. Which is confusing for folks who don't know what OSPO is (which I assume only some Red Hat folks know).

Shouldn't curating the conference program be delegated to a group and only overseen by the Community Architect?

Serve as an executive sponsor for selected Community Initiatives...

selected how? by whom?

Is this image URL pointing outside of the Fedora Docs stable? What is the license of the photo?

I suspect you probably don't want to encourage mailing list usage, but by omitting it, you are excluding a significant portion of Fedora contributors.

I presented this PR with my rewritten role description in today's Fedora Council meeting. The updated role document provides a more specific list of responsibilities to clarify what the community can request my help with. A key change is formally dedicating my time to provide general support, such as for documentation and communications, for all official Fedora Community Initiatives. I am tentatively planning to merge this PR tomorrow, pending final, blocking feedback from reviewers.

Thanks @theprogram and @churchyard for weighing in here already! I will make some new commits to update the draft based on feedback so far.

My overall take is that this encodes too many leadership duties into the FCA job description: Council member, Flock chair, CommOps chair, Mindshare chair, CoC committee chair, alongside the budget duties. While it's important for the FCA to interface w/ all these groups, leading them is too much to load onto one role.

Metadata Update from @jflory7:
- Pull-request tagged with: type - existing docs
- Request assigned

rebased onto bb165ce270a9d044aab478a92477f8c1449f4569

Metadata Update from @jflory7:
- Pull-request tagged with: needs changes

rebased onto cd9955a8dc2172c5a502b4dff58f3077f1a9e3b4