📝 docs(council): Rewrite Community Architect charter #253

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jflory7 wants to merge 10 commits from change/fca-rewrite into main
Owner

This PR rewrites the Fedora Community Architect (FCA) charter to reflect the role's actual, expanded scope of work. The previous charter described the FCA in broad "community manager" terms; this version documents concrete governance, financial, and ecosystem-stewardship responsibilities, and states plainly how the role's Red Hat sponsorship relates to its duty to the Fedora Project.

Key changes

  • Role framing: The introduction now leads with the FCA's formal governance seat on the Fedora Council and its financial/fiduciary dimension, rather than a general "grows the community" description.
  • Roles and Responsibilities restructured into four areas: Fedora Council and Governance (the Council seat, Code of Conduct Committee administration, and Council documentation stewardship), Budget Management, the Flock conference, and a newly explicit CentOS Ecosystem Stewardship area.
  • Community Initiative Support removed, since the Fedora Council paused the Community Initiatives program pending a redesigned process (Council statement).
  • Decision-Making expanded to state that the FCA acts as a fiduciary for the Fedora Project: the community budget is allocated by Red Hat's Open Source & AI Program Office (OSAIPO), but its stewardship serves Fedora's interest, not Red Hat's.
  • Communication section realigned so its stakeholder list only names relationships tied to a formal responsibility defined elsewhere on the page.
  • A new "2026 role changes" section at the end of the page records this rewrite's rationale for future readers, in the same spirit as the page's existing "Why so many titles?" history.

Where to focus review

The fiduciary framing in Decision-Making, the new CentOS Ecosystem responsibilities, and the removal of Community Initiative Support are the most consequential changes — they represent real shifts in what the charter says the role does, not just wording cleanup. Everything else (metadata fixes, section reordering, cross-references) is lower-stakes and mechanical.

Scope

Shaun McCance is added as a document author in recognition of his close consultation on this revision. The "Meet the FCA" biography and "Previous Fedora Community Architects" list are intentionally unchanged in this PR.

A dark-themed screenshot of a Fedora Docs webpage titled "Fedora Community Architect (FCA)" that features a left navigation menu, a right table of contents, and main content detailing roles, responsibilities, and previous architects alongside a small profile picture of a person in a blue cap.

Assisted-by: Claude Sonnet 5 (1M context)

This PR rewrites the Fedora Community Architect (FCA) charter to reflect the role's actual, expanded scope of work. The previous charter described the FCA in broad "community manager" terms; this version documents concrete governance, financial, and ecosystem-stewardship responsibilities, and states plainly how the role's Red Hat sponsorship relates to its duty to the Fedora Project. ## Key changes * **Role framing**: The introduction now leads with the FCA's formal governance seat on the Fedora Council and its financial/fiduciary dimension, rather than a general "grows the community" description. * **Roles and Responsibilities restructured** into four areas: Fedora Council and Governance (the Council seat, Code of Conduct Committee administration, and Council documentation stewardship), Budget Management, the Flock conference, and a newly explicit CentOS Ecosystem Stewardship area. * **Community Initiative Support removed**, since the Fedora Council paused the Community Initiatives program pending a redesigned process ([Council statement](https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-council-statement-on-the-future-of-community-initiatives-and-the-ai-developer-desktop-proposal/195402)). * **Decision-Making expanded** to state that the FCA acts as a fiduciary for the Fedora Project: the community budget is allocated by Red Hat's Open Source & AI Program Office (OSAIPO), but its stewardship serves Fedora's interest, not Red Hat's. * **Communication section realigned** so its stakeholder list only names relationships tied to a formal responsibility defined elsewhere on the page. * **A new "2026 role changes" section** at the end of the page records this rewrite's rationale for future readers, in the same spirit as the page's existing "Why so many titles?" history. ## Where to focus review The fiduciary framing in Decision-Making, the new CentOS Ecosystem responsibilities, and the removal of Community Initiative Support are the most consequential changes — they represent real shifts in what the charter says the role does, not just wording cleanup. Everything else (metadata fixes, section reordering, cross-references) is lower-stakes and mechanical. ## Scope Shaun McCance is added as a document author in recognition of his close consultation on this revision. The "Meet the FCA" biography and "Previous Fedora Community Architects" list are intentionally unchanged in this PR. ![A dark-themed screenshot of a Fedora Docs webpage titled "Fedora Community Architect (FCA)" that features a left navigation menu, a right table of contents, and main content detailing roles, responsibilities, and previous architects alongside a small profile picture of a person in a blue cap.](/attachments/9f7ab283-97af-46da-a60a-dd536ae979fd "A dark-themed screenshot of the Fedora Docs webpage detailing the Fedora Community Architect (FCA) role.") <sub>_Assisted-by: Claude Sonnet 5 (1M context)_</sub>
2.6 MiB
Author
Owner

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

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

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.

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.
Owner

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).

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).
Owner

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

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

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

selected how? by whom?

> Serve as an executive sponsor for selected Community Initiatives... selected how? by whom?
Owner

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

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

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

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.

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.
Contributor

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.

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.
Author
Owner

Metadata Update from @jflory7:

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

Metadata Update from @jflory7:

  • Pull-request tagged with: needs changes
**Metadata Update from @jflory7**: - Pull-request tagged with: needs changes
jflory7 self-assigned this 2026-05-20 17:34:51 +00:00
Author
Owner

*blows off dust*

This PR is eleven months old. It was moved over from Pagure. Now that Flock is in the rearview mirror, I intend to spend more time on this PR and getting into a state that warrants a Council-wide review.

I will put this on the Council meeting agenda project board once it is ready for discussion and feedback.

\*_blows off dust_\* This PR is eleven months old. It was moved over from Pagure. Now that Flock is in the rearview mirror, I intend to spend more time on this PR and getting into a state that warrants a Council-wide review. I will put this on the Council meeting agenda project board once it is ready for discussion and feedback.
jflory7 force-pushed change/fca-rewrite from 92816a41c0 to 5074933380 2026-07-03 09:07:14 +00:00 Compare
The Fedora Community Architect charter has undersold the role's actual
scope, and this commit sharpens the page's introduction and document
metadata to better reflect current responsibilities.

The description and opening paragraph are rewritten to describe the FCA
as one of three permanent Red Hat seats on the Fedora Council, with
institutional, governance, and financial accountability spanning Council
business, budget, Flock, and ecosystem stewardship (CentOS is now named
explicitly). The "Community Initiatives" reference is removed, since the
Council paused that program pending a redesigned process built with
community input.

This commit also fixes a document metadata bug found while previewing
the build locally: the semicolon-separated author line only registers
with Asciidoctor when it is the very first line after the document
title, with no attribute entries ahead of it. The existing file had
`:page-authors:` first, so `{author}`, `{author_2}`, `{author_3}`, and
`{author_4}` never resolved, and Asciidoctor logged "skipping reference
to missing attribute" warnings on every build. Reordering the header
fixes the byline. The `:page-authors:` attribute itself is dropped
because nothing in this repository or the rendered page consumes it —
the UI reads the `{author}` family of attributes directly.

Shaun McCance is also added as a document author in recognition of his
close consultation on this revision. The document is versioned as
v5.0-alpha to mark it as a working draft. It will become v5.0 once
merged to main, with a possible `-beta` stage before then.

Assisted-by: Claude Sonnet 5 (1M context)
Signed-off-by: Justin Wheeler <jwheel@redhat.com>
The "Roles and Responsibilities" section undersold two structural
realities of the FCA seat and named one duty that the role had outgrown.
This commit restructures the section to fix both.

Add "Fedora Council and Governance" as its own subsection. Holding the
FCA seat itself was never listed as a responsibility in its own right,
even though every other duty in this charter flows from it. The Code of
Conduct Committee chair duties move here too, since they are a
governance-body membership function like the Council seat itself, and
their description is narrowed to match what the role actually does:
convening and coordinating meetings, following up on submitted cases in
a timely way, and serving as the Committee's secretary & documentarian.
The FCA does not uniquely drive Committee discussion or deliberation —
that responsibility is shared by all Committee members — so the previous
"uphold and champion psychological safety" and "primary liaison"
language overstated the role and has been replaced. The remaining
Council-documentation maintenance duty is also noted as done in close
consultation with the Fedora Operations Architect, currently @amoloney,
reflecting real overlap between the two roles on Council administration.

The Fedora Mindshare Committee chair duty stays in Budget Management,
where it already lived. The Mindshare Committee is a governance body,
but for the FCA's purposes it is functionally a fiduciary responsibility
— it is the body that reviews and approves community funding requests —
so it belongs with the rest of the budget-stewardship bullets rather
than under general governance.

Remove "Community Initiative Support" as a dedicated subsection. The
Fedora Council paused the Community Initiatives program pending a
redesigned process built with more community input (see ref below),
so a charter section built entirely around sponsoring and onboarding
those initiatives no longer describes real, ongoing work. Its one duty
that was not Initiative-specific — maintaining Council governance
documentation — survives, folded into the new Governance section above.

Remove "Collaboration with Community Ops" as a dedicated subsection. Its
content duplicated the CommOps entry already in the Communication
section's stakeholder list further down the page; keeping both meant the
same commitment was stated twice, once as a whole subsection and once as
a single bullet.

Add "CentOS Ecosystem Stewardship" as a new subsection. Fedora & CentOS
Stream are closely linked as sibling RPM-ecosystem projects, and the
FCA's existing governance and resource-stewardship work already touches
that relationship without ever naming it. So, this section makes it
explicit: representing Fedora's interests on the CentOS Board, serving
as a bridge between the two communities, organizing the CentOS Connect
contributor conference, and supporting communication between CentOS
Special Interest Groups and their partner ecosystem.

Ref: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-council-statement-on-the-future-of-community-initiatives-and-the-ai-developer-desktop-proposal/195402

Assisted-by: Claude Sonnet 5 (1M context)
Signed-off-by: Justin Wheeler <jwheel@redhat.com>
jflory7 added the due date 2026-07-24 2026-07-05 08:41:41 +00:00
The Decision-Making section described the FCA's employment and funding
relationship with Red Hat but never said what that relationship means
when Red Hat's interests and Fedora's interests point in different
directions. This commit makes that explicit and also catches up an
organizational rename.

Red Hat's Open Source Program Office (OSPO) is now the Open Source & AI
Program Office (OSAIPO). This was updated throughout the document. The
opening paragraphs are also rewritten to lead with the financial
relationship rather than mention it in passing: OSAIPO employs the FCA
and allocates the annual Fedora community budget, and stewarding that
allocation well is a key part of the job, not incidentally. The new
"fiduciary" language then draws the consequence directly from that
financial fact: the budget resources belong to Red Hat, but the FCA's
duty in using them runs to the Fedora Project and its community, not to
Red Hat's convenience. This is the distinction that makes it reasonable
for a volunteer-driven community to trust a Red Hat employee with
governance and budget authority over shared resources, and the previous
text implied it without ever stating it outright.

The bulleted list of collaborative decision-making processes below these
paragraphs is unchanged; it remains accurate as written.

Assisted-by: Claude Sonnet 5 (1M context)
Signed-off-by: Justin Wheeler <jwheel@redhat.com>
The "Communication" section's stakeholder liaison list and its
responsibility count both drifted out of sync with the "Roles and
Responsibilities" restructuring done earlier in this rewrite. This
commit brings both back into alignment.

"Proactively share updates and progress related to the five core
responsibilities of the role" was a leftover from the old five-section
structure (Budget, Flock, Community Initiative Support, Community Ops,
Code of Conduct). That structure is now four sections (Governance,
Budget, Flock, CentOS), so the hardcoded count was wrong. Rather than
update it to "four" and risk the same drift the next time this section
changes, the count is dropped in favor of "the FCA's core
responsibilities."

The stakeholder list itself claimed the FCA serves as a liaison to the
DEI Team, the CommOps Team, Mentored Projects, and the Docs Team. None
of those relationships are a formal, dedicated part of the role as
defined elsewhere on this page, however. The FCA may support any of
these teams informally through the responsibilities that are actually
assigned to the role, but listing them as key stakeholder relationships
overstated the FCA's mandate. All four entries are removed.

In their place, the list now names the Code of Conduct Committee, the
Flock Organizing Team, the CentOS Board, and the CentOS Connect
Organizing Team. Each of these traces directly to an explicit duty
already stated in Roles and Responsibilities: the Code of Conduct
Committee and CentOS Board relationships come from the "Fedora Council
and Governance" and "CentOS Ecosystem Stewardship" sections, and the two
organizing-team entries reflect the FCA's conference-management duties
for Flock and CentOS Connect. The result is a stakeholder list that
reads as a direct index of the role's actual responsibilities, rather
than a broader list of teams the FCA happens to interact with.

Assisted-by: Claude Sonnet 5 (1M context)
Signed-off-by: Justin Wheeler <jwheel@redhat.com>
Two gaps remained in the "Decision-Making" section after the rest of
this charter rewrite: "CentOS Ecosystem Stewardship" had no
corresponding entry in the list of collaborative decision-making
processes, and the page said nothing about the FCA's working
relationship with the other two Council staff roles.

Add a bullet naming the CentOS Board and community as the collaborators
for CentOS-related decisions, matching the existing bullets for budget/
documentation decisions (with the Council) and Flock decisions (with the
organizing team).

Add a short paragraph on the FCA's ongoing working relationship with the
Fedora Project Leader and the Fedora Operations Architect. This is
described in terms of what the three staff roles jointly own: the daily
operational toil of Council governance across budget, technical change,
and community strategy, since it is a standing collaboration rather than
something triggered by one category of decision. It is placed after the
bulleted list for that reason, and links to the existing
`xref:fpl.adoc[Fedora Project Leader]` and
`xref:foa.adoc[Fedora Operations Architect]` pages rather than naming
current officeholders directly, consistent with how the Governance
section already links to the FOA page.

Assisted-by: Claude Sonnet 5 (1M context)
Signed-off-by: Justin Wheeler <jwheel@redhat.com>
Two unrelated fixes to the page's header and footer, bundled together
since both touch document structure rather than role content.

The "Article content last reviewed and verified by a human on…" comment
followed by a bare date was never valid AsciiDoc metadata. Comments are
silently dropped but a bare line is not a comment or an attribute entry,
so once the header's attribute-entry parsing reached it, the header
terminated early and the date became the first paragraph of the page
body — visibly, as "2026-07-05" floating above the actual introduction.
This bug predates this rewrite; it was already present in the original
PR #253 commit. The fix folds the date into the revision line's
`revdate` field (`v5.0-alpha, 2026-07-05`), which is the mechanism
AsciiDoc actually provides for this. The Fedora Docs UI already reads
`revdate` and displays it in the byline as "Last review: 2026-07-05,"
right next to the version number it was already rendering correctly.

The new "2026 role changes" section is a short, prose summary of what
changed in this rewrite and why, in the same narrative style as "Why
so many titles?" immediately above it. The intent is the same as that
section's: role charters like this one should carry their own history
forward, so a future reader, including a future FCA, can see not just
what the role covers today, but why it changed. Section names that are
still part of the current page are linked to their anchors; names of
sections that were removed during this rewrite are italicized without a
link, since there is nowhere left to send a reader.

Assisted-by: Claude Sonnet 5 (1M context)
Signed-off-by: Justin Wheeler <jwheel@redhat.com>
"Meet the FCA" previously came after the "Roles and Responsibilities"
breakdown. Moving it up front lets a reader meet the person holding the
role before working through everything the role does, which reads more
naturally for a charter page. No content changed — the section moved
as-is.

Assisted-by: Claude Sonnet 5 (1M context)
Signed-off-by: Justin Wheeler <jwheel@redhat.com>
jflory7 force-pushed change/fca-rewrite from af13a92f41 to de4a3f12a3 2026-07-09 18:09:52 +00:00 Compare
shaunm left a comment

Great structure. Very readable. Here are some changes to lessen the formal CentOS reponsibilities.

Great structure. Very readable. Here are some changes to lessen the formal CentOS reponsibilities.
@ -71,2 +61,3 @@
Participate in planning and organizing Fedoras Flagship events each year, including:
[[roles-centos]]
=== CentOS Ecosystem Stewardship
First-time contributor

Let's drop the word "Stewardship".

Let's drop the word "Stewardship".
Author
Owner

Done — renamed to "CentOS Ecosystem" in 0a7886b.

Done — renamed to "CentOS Ecosystem" in 0a7886b.
jflory7 marked this conversation as resolved
@ -76,1 +65,3 @@
* Fedora contributor hackfests
* Represent Fedora's interests within the CentOS project, engaging with the CentOS Board on governance, elections, and community transitions.
* Serve as a bridge between the Fedora and CentOS communities, sharing lessons, tooling, and processes across the upstream/downstream relationship.
* Organize CentOS Connect, the project's annual contributor conference, coordinating logistics and programming with the CentOS community.
First-time contributor

"Assist with CentOS Connect, the project's annual contributor conference, ensuring a strong Fedora presence."

"Assist with CentOS Connect, the project's annual contributor conference, ensuring a strong Fedora presence."
Author
Owner

Done — adopted your wording verbatim in 0a7886b.

Done — adopted your wording verbatim in 0a7886b.
jflory7 marked this conversation as resolved
@ -77,0 +66,4 @@
* Serve as a bridge between the Fedora and CentOS communities, sharing lessons, tooling, and processes across the upstream/downstream relationship.
* Organize CentOS Connect, the project's annual contributor conference, coordinating logistics and programming with the CentOS community.
* Advocate for CentOS Stream partners and users, surfacing their needs and feedback to the Fedora community and to Red Hat engineering.
* Support open, transparent communication between CentOS Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and the broader partner ecosystem.
First-time contributor

Let's change "broader partner ecosystem" to "Fedora partner ecosystem" so it's more clearly Fedora-aligned.

Let's change "broader partner ecosystem" to "Fedora partner ecosystem" so it's more clearly Fedora-aligned.
Author
Owner

Done — changed to "Fedora partner ecosystem" in 0a7886b.

Done — changed to "Fedora partner ecosystem" in 0a7886b.
jflory7 marked this conversation as resolved
@ -91,0 +86,4 @@
* Decisions related to budget allocation and official project documentation are made with the xref:council::index.adoc[{team_name}].
* Decisions related to Flock planning are made in collaboration with the Flock organizing team and relevant community stakeholders.
* Decisions related to CentOS ecosystem stewardship are made in collaboration with the CentOS Board and the broader CentOS community.
First-time contributor

Let's just drop this line entirely. FCA is not a decision-making role in CentOS.

Let's just drop this line entirely. FCA is not a decision-making role in CentOS.
Author
Owner

Done — removed the CentOS decision-making bullet in 0a7886b.

Done — removed the CentOS decision-making bullet in 0a7886b.
jflory7 marked this conversation as resolved
@ -91,0 +124,4 @@
* *CentOS Board*:
Represent Fedora's interests in CentOS governance, elections, and community transitions.
* *CentOS Connect Organizing Team*:
Coordinate conference logistics and programming for CentOS Connect.
First-time contributor

s/Coordinate/Assist with/

s/Coordinate/Assist with/
Author
Owner

Done — changed to "Assist with" in 0a7886b.

Done — changed to "Assist with" in 0a7886b.
jflory7 marked this conversation as resolved
@ -129,0 +171,4 @@
=== 2026 role changes
In 2026, this charter was substantially rewritten to describe the FCA's actual scope of work, rather than the broader "community manager" framing it had carried since the role's earliest days.
<<roles,_Roles and Responsibilities_>> was reorganized around four concrete areas — <<roles-governance,_Council governance_>>, <<roles-budget,_budget and fiduciary stewardship_>>, the <<roles-flock,_Flock conference_>>, and <<roles-centos,_CentOS ecosystem stewardship_>> — with CentOS added as a newly explicit responsibility, reflecting the deepening relationship between Fedora and its sibling project.
First-time contributor

Drop "stewardship".

Drop "stewardship".
Author
Owner

Done — dropped "stewardship" from the section reference in 0a7886b.

Done — dropped "stewardship" from the section reference in 0a7886b.
jflory7 marked this conversation as resolved
Address review feedback from Shaun @shaunm on council/docs#253. The FCA
supports and assists CentOS work but does not own CentOS decision-making
or conference organizing — those belong to the CentOS community itself.
This commit reframes the CentOS section accordingly: the section heading
drops "Stewardship," CentOS Connect language shifts from "Organize" to
"Assist with" the CentOS decision-making bullet is removed entirely, and
"broader partner ecosystem" is narrowed to "Fedora partner ecosystem" to
keep the framing Fedora-aligned.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context)
Signed-off-by: Justin Wheeler <jwheel@redhat.com>
Author
Owner

Thanks for the thorough look, @shaunm! Accepted all your suggestions in 0a7886bcae. Re-requesting your review now.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context)

Thanks for the thorough look, @shaunm! Accepted all your suggestions in 0a7886bcae. Re-requesting your review now. <sub>_Assisted-by: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context)_</sub>
jflory7 modified the due date from 2026-07-24 to 2026-07-31 2026-07-18 01:57:27 +00:00
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