The general idea of increasing the amount of information in "Benefits for Fedora" and "User experience" sounds reasonable. Some Change pages have almost no text there, even though they have user visible impact.

But I don't like the proposed new sub-sections. The split between "technical" and "distribution" seems very arbitrary, and even some of the examples in the proposed template could fit in either of those sections. Instead of adding two new sections that would have to be present in every page, I'd rather just see the comment in the template expanded to provide those additional examples and guidance, without enforcing any structure. It would be also good to provide links to some Change pages from previous editions that were particularly were done and could be used as inspiration.

This will be discussed at the 2018-04-06 FESCo meeting.

I'm definitely +1 for this change, and agree with @zbyszek's comments above. Let's show people how to do the right thing, but not make the template so rigid that it causes frustrations.

FESCo Meeting (2018-04-06):

With disagreement in the attending members, no binding vote will be possible today. Request is for the proposal to be updated with a better template. (sgallagh, 15:09:33)

Possibly relevant: I just updated the talking points template to look like this:

The hook: A couple of sentences explaining why users will be excited about this. Say more than can be guessed by just reading the talking point headline.
Interesting details: One or two background points about Fedora's involvement, the developers or team involved, or other bits highlighting the Fedora Project angle.
For more information: Link to change page, upstream notes, and anything else relevant.

I'm definitely +1 for this change, and agree with @zbyszek's comments above. Let's show people how to do the right thing, but not make the template so rigid that it causes frustrations.

It would be great to have this good information in the change templates but I have a little bit of doubt that we can get all the technical maintainers become great authors for marketing. So IMHO the goal should be for experienced writers to get the necessary information but id does not need to be a good marketing text (but it would be great if it is) and this should be communicated by the template.

I'll reach back into history and point out that originally this process and these pages were called "Features". FESCo would use them for technical things, Marketing would use them for interesting content or changes that were worth getting publicity on for the next release. In theory, this sounds great. In practice, it was a failure on both sides.

FESCo didn't, and in my opinion still doesn't, want to become the arbiter of what was considered a "feature". People would file features for things like adding the D compiler, which is cool but not something we'd really call out as new/interesting to a wide variety of users. Then we'd debate forever if something was "feature worthy" and it was a waste of time. For things we did accept, sometimes they weren't marketable at all or the marketing team couldn't tell a great story around it from the page, etc. Disappointment abound.

So we switched the name to Changes, which helped the FESCo side of things. We need to account for and coordinate technical changes to the distribution. E.g. a typical rebase of a package or language stack, which happens almost every release, needs to be communicated to the maintainers and accounted for on the technical level. The intention at the time was to let people go directly to marketing with release notes or things they considered newsworthy and let the people doing that work decided. I'm not sure that actually happened or has been working well.

So if we want to add sections to the Change template that's fine, but let's make sure we're doing it with this in mind so we don't repeat failures from the past.

And now I feel old and I need to shave off this grey beard.

This was discussed in the FESCo meeting today:
ACTION: zbyszek to generate a counter-proposal to spur discussion

I tried to come up with something more along my suggestions in https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/1868#comment-502828. It's not easy ;(

https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=User%3AZbyszek%2FChangesEmptyTemplateDraft&type=revision&diff=516441&oldid=516434

Please take a look.

Oh, in particular, we should make the UX section mandatory also for non-system-wide changes. Actually I don't see why we ever assumed that non-system-wide changes don't affect users. This is now done in the proposed text above.

This was discussed in FESCo meeting today:

agreed Accept zbyszek's proposal to change the Change Template (+1:6, -1:0, +0:0)

https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=Changes%2FEmptyTemplate&type=revision&diff=516458&oldid=516457

I just got a chance to read these changes. THESE ARE AWESOME! Thank you!