(Moving over from https://pagure.io/Fedora-Council/council-docs/issue/275)

We've always had people turn up on various channels and say "Fedora should do this" in different forms. A common request on the discussion forum, for example, is "Please add this package to Fedora".

Each time this happens, community members reply with the same information on these lines:

• we're a volunteer community
• a few of us are paid to work on Fedora
• a majority work on Fedora in their free time, after they've done their jobs and taken care of their personal lives
• community members work on bits that interest them, bits that they use
• if stuff comes up, sometimes community members have to pause their Fedora contributions (and this can lead to various "issues")

In short, that for most of us volunteers, it's a "best effort" system. We do what we can, when we can.

For package maintainers, we explain that package maintainers tend to maintain packages they use, so that they can test them out and keep up with them---and that they don't take on "packaging requests" unless they use the package themselves.

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These conversations sometimes don't go well, because people making these requests are generally unaware of how we work. They are so used to the industry model where they pay for a service and so expect the service (and expect to be able to complain to "someone higher up") that when they're told that we're unable to service their request (for whatever reason), it can be perceived as us not taking accountability or that there's a lack of support towards our "userbase".

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It isn't that we're not accountable, but that we follow a different model of accountability. The issue is that this is not set out anywhere in the community. Community members learn this over time, but people that are not community members apply the industry model of service/expectations/accountability to us, and that mismatch can create unpleasantness/friction.

So, I am wondering if it is possible for us to clearly set out how we work, and what users can expect from us somewhere, either as a sort of policy, or even just a page in the docs. Not only will it help people outside the community understand how/why/when things happen (or don't happen), it'll also give community members a resource to point to when such conversations do come up.