we are happy to announce the creation of a new Working Group about governance
The new working group is called Governance guidance and joins efforts from the Governance Readiness and Principles of Governing OSS Working Groups. In the last meeting at the Governance Readiness working group (check meeting notes here), it was decided to close them and create a new one aligning efforts.
The purpose of this working group is to facilitate the elicitation of governance models in Open Source projects. To this aim, we will focus our efforts on the elaboration on principles on governance and the definition of a matrix of questions to ask frequently (joining ideas from previous WGs).
@greggish and I are the bottom-liners of this working group. @GeorgLink is also involved in the initiative. Of course, anyone is more than welcome. If you are interested, contact any of us.
It would be awesome, but we thought that that category could be named āGovernanceā. This way, it could collect all working lines about the topic, what do you think?
Just reading through the 2021 summary report and I noticed a checklist of questions in a different section ā in Building a Community, specifically p 15-17 ā that we might want to cross-reference with our question set and potentially augment accordingly.
I can try to get to this in a bit, unless anyoneās already done it?
OK I had 20 minutes so I went through them and cross-referenced our grid. We already had several of these in some form, but quite a few I didnāt find clearly represented.
These are some questions that Iām not immediately sure where to place in the grid. I could guess, but I wonder what you all would think
How do you plan end-of-life before the first commit?
Is there a good security strategy?
Is continuous integration continuous deployment (CICD) set up from the start?
Is there a public roadmap?
Are there scaling processes delineated?
What is the bus factor of the organization?
Are there tutorials or walk-throughs for new users?
Is there a delineation of roles, and how new roles are created?
Are there venues to talk to the community about what they [?] did, and how they did it, so that people can learn from each other?
Is accessibility considered? Are translations?
Thoughts on where each of these should go?
Also, I added this one to Rules under Code but i revised a bit and want to check to see if it resonates:
How will contributions be reviewed ā and approved, revised, or rejected?
And I put this in rules about āCommunityā but not sure:
Are there regular check-ins?
Feedback welcome! We might also want to engage with Erin McKean (@esperluette?) to solicit their perspective?
Perhaps we could consider new sections in the existing governance list, instead of trying to cram new questions into categories that donāt fit. What if we added new categories to the governance readiness checklist and moved some of the questions above into these new categories? We might even re-sort old questions too:
Community & decision-making
Diversity, equity, & inclusion
āOpenā development best practices
I was wondering about reviving the working group for a fixed period to iterate the governance readiness checklist further. It managed to achieve a level of popularity, and perhaps we can leverage that by updating it to be more comprehensive.
Good point Justin! If you refer to the old governance readiness checklist, do you think those categories could be added as orthogonal dimensions?
On the other hand, if you refer to the grid, I would bet they should be added as new columns, but @greggish may have a different view. In any case, if added as columns, I think we should check potential overlapping with the ones we already have. Nice point to explore/discuss.
I might be able to contribute some knowledge to this.
):