Create an official Fedora Project policy for our chat platforms, which deprecates IRC as an official platform in favor of migrating to Matrix as our one and only official chat platform
We are in a painful situation today because the LiberaChat/Matrix bridges are offline until further notice. Our project communications are fragmented, with some contributors of the same team using IRC and others using Matrix. Infrastructure we rely on for collaboration (e.g. Zodbot, Meetbot) is disconnected and teams are going without tools that help make our work and decisions more open and transparent.
Something has to change. And the time for change is now.
The number one aim for this proposal is for Fedora to have one, and only one, official chat platform. Although we advertise Matrix as an official platform (at least in the description of the Fedora space on Matrix), IRC is technically an official platform too. The relationship between IRC and Matrix is unclear. In addition to having very different clients and tools, newcomers often face the struggle of being directed to use one or the other tool. This makes onboarding newcomers difficult, which runs against one of the objectives in our five-year strategy ("Modernize our communications tooling").
The means of accomplishing this aim is to create a new policy about an official chat platform for Fedora. In this policy, we would designate Matrix/Element as our official chat platform. IRC would no longer be an officially recognized or supported platform for project collaboration and workflow. Teams who absolutely require IRC may choose to set up and use an IRC bridge, but it would be unsupported community infrastructure, and the Fedora Infrastructure Team would be freed of the responsibility of fixing things if they break. It would be completely up to a specific team or group to create and maintain any bridges for their team.
To accomplish this, we need to give time for the community to acknowledge and prepare for this transition. Three action items are already in place to move this work forward:
After this, we need to formalize a plan. In the 2023-08-16 meeting, I proposed the following plan, which can be revised based on more community feedback:
#action jwf
Personally, I don't particularly care which chat platform is used. The text based interface for IRC is still more efficient for me (basically, the issue is that irssi and other IRC clients use the screen real estate very efficiently, while all "modern" tools that I've seen use lots and lots of vertical whitespace, which means that during a meeting I can see ~15 lines instead of ~50). But this is not very important, I can live with a less convenient interface.
The problem is with surrounding tools. In particular we have zodbot, and we have the integration of logs on meetbot.fedoraproject.org. Having logs is crucial for transparency and long-term accountability.
Coordinate with FESCo and Mindshare on preparing to migrate to Matrix natively.
For me "migrate" means having a plan how to replace existing functionality, or if it cannot be replaced, explain what to do instead. I haven't seen any mention of that yet.
I agree. There needs to be a way to run official meetings. I don't particularly care about how that works, but it's core to our transparent decision processes. So since the bridge is down for an indefinite amount of time, I don't think we can abandon IRC entirely until there's a matrix-native replacement for meetbot (and possibly zodbot).
@zbyszek wrote… …we have the integration of logs on meetbot.fedoraproject.org. Having logs is crucial for transparency and long-term accountability. @decathorpe wrote… I don't particularly care about how that works, but it's core to our transparent decision processes.
@zbyszek wrote… …we have the integration of logs on meetbot.fedoraproject.org. Having logs is crucial for transparency and long-term accountability.
@decathorpe wrote… I don't particularly care about how that works, but it's core to our transparent decision processes.
Yes, this came up in the Council meeting and we agreed that is blocking criteria for being able to make a full move. Fortunately, some work has already started on this in cpe/initiatives-proposal#29. But there is no timeline for completion.
See also:
Discussed in 2023-08-30 meeting in #meeting:fedoraproject.org. No logs due to lack of Meetbot infrastructure.
#meeting:fedoraproject.org
Before the meeting today, I posted Fedora-Council/council-docs#201 with a first draft proposal for this policy. See the PR for the full text.
The consensus from the meeting today was to take more time to read, review, and add comments in Fedora-Council/council-docs#201. We would review that PR in the next Council meeting, and then also kick off the Policy Change Policy for a public comment period after the next Council meeting.
One point brought up by @bookwar was on the challenge of defining "Fedora leadership groups." A definition for that is hard, and might be out of scope for this policy. We might not want to do that here, right now. Her proposed edit is to remove mention of "Fedora leadership groups" altogether, and instead simply list the four groups that would be impacted, i.e. Council, FESCo, Mindshare, DEI.
See discussion in the PR here for follow-up to the previously-shared feedback.
I'm +1 to this with one caveat -- I think we should drop the lines about antagonism and enforcement, and assume good faith from our project teams. If a problem does arise, we should do something -- it is a policy, after all.
I also made a bunch of minor comments, mostly grammatical quibbles of little consequence. :)
This implies that groups that are established on mailing lists have to switch to Discussions and IRC users will have to switch to Matrix due to the broken bridge. It feels to me that this should receive wider community feedback first.
I don't particularly want to force a switch to Discourse.
The Matrix part is more agreeable, as the current situation is very broken, but I don't think we should handle this at the same time as the Discourse part, and both issues should receive wider community input/feedback.
Discussed in 2023-10-11 meeting.
We continued the discussion about Matrix and its fit for our primary synchronous project communication platform. It seems like the proposal drafted in Fedora-Council/council-docs#201 was not a uniform understanding among the Council. The unanswered question remains whether to continue using Matrix or whether we adopt a new service, which did not have agreement among the Council. However, we did seem to be in uniform agreement that IRC is not the direction we want to pursue. @davdunc volunteered to facilitate a community conversation, but it seems probable that the Fedora Council needs to align first on where to drive a Fedora community conversation.
This topic needs to be a continued conversation, although it likely needs to be tightly scoped so we arrive on a clear proposal that can be voted on and taken into action by Council members.
Also, @davdunc, I sent you a DM on Matrix about this topic when you get a moment to look.
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