Wild idea: What if the change owners self-serviced (the announcements and) the fesco tickets? Obviously, it would have to be very well documented and there would need to be a way to ask for help.

cc @amoloney

@churchyard That would be even better.

I have a few questions:

1. Is this suggestion to have FESCo manage the change proposals for an interim period only until there is someone officially assigned the change proposal management task?
2. With regard to change proposal owners managing the announcement and FESCo ticket creation, what are you gaining that was missing from the 'normal' (pre-redhat-layoffs) process?

@amoloney My number one goal is to document who is responsible for creating the tickets. I feel like we have a gap right now, because it's unclear whose responsibility this is.

1. Is this suggestion to have FESCo manage the change proposals for an interim period only until there is someone officially assigned the change proposal management task?

I would like to have FESCo permanently manage the change proposals. Now this may mean that FESCO appoints someone from outside of FESCO to do the work, but what I would like to see is that in the future when whoever is creating the tickets stops doing this for whatever reason that FESCO knows it needs to take action and appoint someone else to do it.

1. With regard to change proposal owners managing the announcement and FESCo ticket creation, what are you gaining that was missing from the 'normal' (pre-redhat-layoffs) process?

I think it will help speed up the process from proposal to approval and it will also make the process more robust by not relying on a single person to do everything.

Ben created super documentation https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/program_management/ for the FPgMs role, but I see that the SOPs read with the assumption that someone is actively in this position and that's not the reality right now so yep, a clear gap.

The reasoning behind wanting to move the responsibility to FESCo to either own outright or appoint an owner does make a lot of sense, so thank you for explaining the thought process a bit more. Im interested to see what decision is reached on this as there's valid points raised and Im still happy to help out processing changes in the interim (or after!) if needed :)

Wild idea: What if the change owners self-serviced (the announcements and) the fesco tickets? Obviously, it would have to be very well documented and there would need to be a way to ask for help.

I understand the reasoning, but I'm not sure about making the process self-service. The Changes process is an area of expertise. Most contributors submit zero proposals per release cycle. Those who do submit proposals generally submit 1 or 2. So they don't have a lot of experience with doing it right: both in the "is the proposal itself correctly filled out?" and the "is it being properly communicated to
the community?" aspects.

There's a lot of value in having someone who interacts with the process regularly be involved, because they make sure both of those aspects are answered "yes". It also means the process is done consistently, which makes life easier for the rest of the community.

There were a lot of times that I made minor changes or kicked a Change proposal back to the because it was insufficient or incoherent. This work was largely invisible, but I'd like to think it was valuable. Of course, it may turn out that it was not meaningful and a more inconsistent process works just fine.

For the not-self-service scenario, FESCo should appoint a single person to be responsible at a time. I refuse to do it on principle, but I worked closely with Aoife to train her on various processes so she would be a good candidate. I do think there's some procedural value in having the wrangler be independent of the approval body, but I haven't given it much explicit thought.

I would prefer if @amoloney continued to do this. For the reasons that @bcotton listed, and also because I expect we'll be more on time this way. 7 FESCo members doing this in rotation once every few weeks will — in my expectation — delays and hiccups every other week or three. If Aoife or whoever is doing needs to stop for some time, we can always arrange a temporary replacement.

I agree. The self-service idea was a brainstorm in case there would be nobody willing to risk their job err... volunteer for the task.

This was discussed during today's FESCo meeting:
AGREED: amoloney is designated as the point of contact for change proposal ticket processing (+6,0,0)

Thanks, @amoloney!