Who should vote in Fedora elections?

Creating fair governance models for open-source projects is not easy; defining criteria for participants to receive membership and voting rights is a particularly thorny problem for projects that have elections for representative bodies. The Fedora Council, the project's top-level governance body, is wrestling with that conundrum now. This was triggered by a Fedora special-interest group (SIG) granting temporary membership to at least one person for the sole purpose of allowing them to vote in the most recent Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) election. That opened a large can of worms about what it means to be a contributor and how contributors can be identified for voting purposes.

Fedora's elections are held after each release cycle; for example, the most recent was the FESCo Fedora 43 election, which ran from December 17, 2025 to January 7, 2026. It is not a high bar to be eligible to vote in a FESCo election. First, one must have membership in the "cla_done" group; that is available to anyone who has a Fedora account (which requires agreeing to the Code of Conduct) and has signed the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement. Secondly, a person must be a member of an additional group unrelated to the cla_done group. That could be membership in any of the eligible Fedora groups, and there are literally hundreds of Fedora groups that fit the bill. It is not difficult at all for someone who is active in the Fedora community in some fashion to gain membership to a group that would allow them to vote in an election.

Temporary SIG membership

Even though the barrier to voting was not high, some thought it should be lower still. During the Fedora 43 FESCo election cycle, Fedora user "JandeMus" asked why he was receiving an error when trying to vote:

It took me almost half an hour to find (some) groups but I have no idea which one to join. Why is this even necessary, can't I, with a FAS [Fedora Account System] account, not just vote? Joining a group means applying first, only for the sake of being able to vote. That's all I want to do.

Fedora does not make things easy.

Hristo Marinov replied with some links to the Fedora documentation about elections and groups. JandeMus replied that he would give up on the idea; he complained again that "Fedora makes things unnecessarily complicated" and that it was a shame that he, and others like him, who would not join a group for voting purposes, were prevented from participating in Fedora elections.

"MatH" replied on January 5 that the group membership requirement was merely "to keep the trolls out", and offered to grant JandeMus membership in the Fedora Join SIG so that he could vote. The Join SIG is a group that is involved in various efforts to welcome new people to Fedora. Marinov questioned whether that was a good or recommended practice, but MatH replied that JandeMus had been on Fedora's Discourse forum for more than two years and had made more than 400 posts, which had garnered lots of likes. "If that is the kind of person we want to keep out of Fedora, then please do let me know. [...] If some AI bots come and ask for membership I'll be sure to turn them down."

Christopher Klooz, one of the forum's moderators, joined in the discussion and objected to the idea that Fedora's group requirements were only to keep trolls out of the elections. He argued that the need to be sponsored into a group besides FAS was intentional and designed to ensure people voting for FESCo had the requisite understanding of the project. After further discussion, he said that MatH had abused his privileges in providing temporary group membership, and that he would report it if it happened again. JandeMus said that he was sorry he had asked the question and apologized "for all the commotion I caused". He also asked that the discussion thread be closed. Klooz responded that JandeMus had brought up a matter that needed attention, and he closed the topic thread.

On January 7, Klooz opened a ticket with the Fedora Council. In the ticket, he reported that MatH's position was shared by others in the Join SIG, and it was unclear how actively it would be used in the future. He asked the council to provide clear guidance on whether this was allowed or if the voting rules should be changed in some fashion.

Discussion

A discussion thread was opened on Discourse to allow the Fedora community to provide its thoughts on the matter. Join SIG member Ankur Sinha weighed in to say that he was uncomfortable with how the discussion about the SIG's actions had been handled to date. The Join SIG gave voting rights to people for contributions, such as editing the Fedora wiki, "because large parts of Fedora contribution do not rely on FAS groups". He felt that it would be putting process over people to bar the Join SIG from granting temporary memberships for voting.

Fedora Project Leader Jef Spaleta asked what the process is for establishing an entity with a FAS group. Could he simply create a Fedora Curling SIG that would allow creating a FAS group with voting rights? He said that he had deep concerns about tying voting rights to arbitrary FAS groups:

How many SIGs right now are in fact just ghost fas groups and are effectively non-functional with no attachment points for onboarding new contributors?

If you want to tie voting strongly with SIGs, then we need to have SIGs being functional self-governing groups.. and not the laissez-faire structures as they exist right now.

Eduard Lucena responded that the process to create a SIG is lightweight, but creating a FAS group requires opening a ticket with Fedora's infrastructure and release engineering team. "So basically is at discretion of the infra team what FAS groups are created". Kevin Fenzi, Fedora's infrastructure lead, said that there had been much discussion in the council and Fedora's community operations group to try to figure out what makes someone a contributor. The council has a goal of increasing the number of contributors, so it seemed like a good thing to come up with a commonly agreed criteria—especially if it could be expressed in a way that Fedora's election software could use to determine eligibility.

Spaleta said he would go farther than that; it seemed to him that it was not just a good thing, but a necessary thing to have such a criteria. He suggested it might be possible to use Fedora's badge system, which provides a leaderboard system for tracking contributions to various parts of Fedora, as a proxy for eligibility. Fenzi and Spaleta traded a few ideas, but no concrete proposal has been formed.

"Too complex"

Fedora Council member Justin Wheeler reported that the topic had been "the centerpiece of a significant debate" during the council's meeting on January 14. He said that there was tension between being inclusive and the potential that an election could be gamed via temporary memberships:

We discussed the difficulty of defining "active contributors" and noted that "legacy" voting rights for inactive members are just as problematic as new temporary ones. The Council determined this topic is too complex to resolve in a single meeting and requires detailed asynchronous discussion here on Fedora Discussion rather than waiting for the 2026 Strategy Summit.

The summit that Wheeler referred to is taking place in Tirana, Albania starting on February 3 and running through February 5; the participants are primarily council members and leads of council initiatives.

It is not clear how many people were granted voting rights by the Join SIG, but there was no sign of a major influx of new voters for the Fedora F43 FESCo election cycle. In fact, there were fewer voters than the previous cycle. According to the results page a total of 214 voters participated. There were 231 voters for the Fedora 42 election, only 166 for the Fedora 41 cycle, and 236 for Fedora 40. A spot check of the results going back to June 2008, shows that FESCo elections tend to draw a range somewhere between about 150 and 300 voters.

To put that in perspective, the FAS group for Fedora packagers has more than 1,400 members. That group is worth noting for two reasons. One, there is actually a fairly high bar for joining the packager group. Secondly, because there is a process for removing people from the packager group if they have been inactive for 12 months. The Fedora infrastructure team removes inactive packagers each release cycle, unlike other FAS groups that might have members who have not been active for years. Not to mention FAS groups that are, themselves, no longer related to active SIGs or working groups within Fedora. One might conclude that, at the moment, the problem is not that a few people are sneaking into the ballot booth for Fedora elections; it's that too few Fedora participants bother to vote at all.

For now, the discussion continues. Nailing down the right criteria to define contributors with the right to vote, and having a fair system in place to ensure they are able to do so, will not be easy.