Governance

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

• Lattemann, Stieglitz (2005) Framework for Governance in Open Source Communities
• Scientific study about Debian Project governance and social organization