Cross-project-council: Define 'Open Governance' requirements for Top Level Projects

[jorydotcom]

In summary from the Project Progression meeting this morning, the attendees are in general agreement that Open Governance should be a core value of top level projects.

The suggestion is to start with the JSF's Mentorship Program as a jumping off point (copied below, linked here

Mentorship

The purpose of mentorship is to support and mentor projects entering the
Foundation. The goal is for projects to be:

• Participatory
• Transparent
• Effective

While certain processes are strongly recommended based on the experiences of the
Foundation and its Projects, the goal of mentorship is not to enforce a specific
set of processes but to ensure that the processes adopted and accepted by a
project achieve these goals. Therefore, the requirements for graduating from
mentorship are based on metrics that demonstrate success in terms of these
values. These metrics are:

• Project's defined governing body is 5 members or greater
• No more than 1/3 of the defined governing body is affiliated with the same
  employer.
• No more than 1/3 of any Project is affiliated with the same employer.
• The decision making and release process is documented and publicly accessible.
• Other metrics as defined by the applying Project during the application
  process in cooperation with their mentor

A Project may apply to graduate from mentorship at any time by calling for a
vote in the TAC.

While a Project is under mentorship, it is assigned at least 1 [mentor][] who
is responsible for working with the Project to adopt policies and gain the
health and contributorship it will need in order to graduate from mentorship.
The mentor list is nominated and approved by the TAC and may be larger than the
TAC.

[mcollina]

I am ok in using the requirements of a Graduated project for our top-level projects:

• Project's defined governing body is 5 members or greater
• No more than 1/3 of the defined governing body is affiliated with the same
  employer.
• No more than 1/3 of any Project is affiliated with the same employer.
• The decision making and release process is documented and publicly accessible.
• Other metrics as defined by the applying Project during the application process in cooperation with the CPC.

[dylans]

“No more than 1/3 of any Project is affiliated with the same employer.”

Could we please elaborate on how this is defined? Is a project lines of code ever or over some amount of time, number of contributors, # of contributions over some amount of time, or some other formula.

[mhdawson]

Hmm, I agree with @dylans question.

No more than 1/3 of the defined governing body is affiliated with the same employer. is easy to quantify while No more than 1/3 of any Project is affiliated with the same employer seems less concrete.

I think we should keep the governing body part and drop the second one. I think the first is a good metric of if there is open governance. The second less so and can be problematic at a point in time as contribution for individuals/companies will vary over time with peaks and valleys.

[dmethvin]

Yeah I think the governing body part is the best measure. There may be times when a company is willing to dedicate resources to a project and ends up with a lot of PRs that skew contributions in some time frame.

It's important IMO for a project's governing body to continue to have active participants beyond a single company. So that brings up the possibility that a top-level project might become non-top-level if they stop meeting the criteria at some point. When you think about a project lifecycle it seems very reasonable for that to happen. For example, RequireJS was the loader a decade ago but now is in maintenance mode and not a lot of that is needed.

[mcollina]

I agree with the "governing body" definition.

[jlipps]

👍 to "governing body" definition. the combination of 5 members and the 1/3 restriction means that each of the 5 will have to come from a different company (because 2/5 = 0.4 > 1/3). It might be difficult for some newer projects to have 5 different companies (or individuals) represented in their governance, but on the whole feel that it's a reasonable goal and requirement for being a TLP.

[mcollina]

@jlipps I think we should allow to have 2/5. Something like:

No more than 1/3 of the defined governing body (rounded by excess) is affiliated with the same employer.

In that case, a single employer can have 2.

[jlipps]

@mcollina I'm also fine special-casing 5 members, as I think 2 from the same company will be a common occurrence early on, and 2/5 doesn't seem that bad to me (can't control outcome via a vote). So I'm +1 to your proposed language (I hadn't heard the phrase "rounded by excess" before and assume it means just what we're talking about).

[MylesBorins]

As #88 has landed I think this can be closed. Feel free to re-open or let me know that I should if this was closed prematurely