Governance Readiness Working Group

👥 Working Groups Governance
9

Thanks everyone for participating. This is the video recording of the call and some summary notes.

Watch the recording

Timestamps

Participants

  1. Javier Cánovas
  2. Justin W. Flory
  3. Farbod Saraf
  4. Georgia Bullen
  5. Tracy Hinds
  6. Nathan Schneider

Notes

Review of Sustain OSS session

  • As issues (i.e., post-its at the session) can be part of one or more categories (decision-making mechanisms, community, methodology and legal) it may be better to consider such categories as viewpoints. For instance, the code of conduct in a project may mainly be seen as a legal asset but also as part of the other categories, with different implications.
  • It is important to consider how the identified categories would work depending on the role of the stakeholder (i.e., contributor, manager, external user, etc.)
  • The category called Decision-making mechanisms is maybe the most important one and may play a foundation role for the rest.

Goal of the Working Group

  • There is a general agreement that Governance Readiness matters.
  • To assess the readiness of a project the idea is to provide a set of questions that can help you to realize the status of your project.
  • To build a language to speak about governance (e.g., helping to identify what a good governance practice is).
  • To pay special attention to how governance may evolve in software projects.

Next steps

  • Identify questions that motivate people to create/identify a governance model.
    • Describe the scenario (e.g., new vs. old projects).
    • Specify the expected role of the respondent.
    • Describe good / acceptable / poor answers.
    • Be careful with assumptions.
  • Collect good/bad governance practices.
    • Identify the main challenges related to governance issues.
  • Explore the advances on communityRule initiative to study possible alternatives for building a governance language. I can also help us to identify the type of questions we can make.

Action items

  • @jwf: Create a document crossing the items obtained from the Sustain OSS event against the communityRule website questions. I can also help with this.
  • @jlcanovas: Have a closer look at metagov.org initiative (parent project of communityRule). Attend to its weekly meeting to better understand its plan and objectives.

Where do we go from here?

Although this first meeting was a bit loose, I believe it helped to focus the work of the Working Group. Before planning the next meeting, I would like to advance on the action items to identify concrete elements that we can discuss.

I’ll keep you informed about our advances. I plan to create a new poll in some days to choose the date/time of the next meeting.

Thanks everyone who joined the call and made it happen in these crazy days.

PS: If I forget something, please tell me and I’ll update the thread

2 Likes