Governance

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Revision as of 09:25, 19 January 2009 by 172.22.0.160 (talk)
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Apertium is turning into a rather large and complex free/open-source project and is ready for the implementation of a more formal scheme for its governance. Important decisions such as, for instance

  • settling a higher-level dictionary format in the spirit of metadix
  • deciding which standard of a language will be adopted, as was done with Occitan
  • deciding if Apertium will be moving away from Sourceforge)
  • etc.

are to be taken in the immediate future in a way which is accepted by a large majority of the Apertium community.

Currently (January 19, 2009), the project has 7 administrators: ftyers, g-ramirez, mlforcada, sanmarf, sortiz, and xgg, and 79 developers. These positions have all been appointed by a co-opting system.

Perhaps we need to draft a brief constitution, taking the following points into consideration:

  • How does one decide when a developer is appointed or dismissed (currently, administrators have freely appointed developers, and no developer has been dismissed)
  • Should decisions affecting the engine and compilers be handled differently from those affecting a language pair or other components?
  • How does one decide when a developer becomes administrator (this decision has been taken similarly to the previous one)
  • Defining voting rights to take decisions:
    • do all decisions need the same degree of consensus?
    • should developers have the right to vote?
    • should the vote of everyone have the same weight? For instance, should it depend on the number of commits?
    • will there be vetoing rights?
    • how large a majority will be needed to adopt a decision?

Interesting reading

  • [ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/9518/30166/01385626.pdf Lattemann, Stieglitz (2005) Framework for Governance in Open Source Communities]