User:Mlforcada/sandbox/governance

.... still working on it....

Mission

1. The mission of the Apertium project is to develop free/open-source machine translation for as many languages as possible
2. (... brief mission material from Mikel's slides, small languages, philosophy)

Roles and responsibilities

Users

1. The most important participants in the project are people who use Apertium. The majority of our developers start out as users and guide their development efforts from the user's perspective.
2. Users contribute to the Apertium project by providing feedback to developers in the form of bug reports and feature suggestions. As well, users participate in the Apertium community by helping other users on the mailing list and in the chat channel

Developers

1. Developers are volunteers who are contributing time, code, documentation, or resources to Apertium. A developer that makes sustained, welcome contributions to the project may be invited to become a committer, though the exact timing of such invitations depends on many factors

The assembly of committers

1. The project's Committers are responsible for the project's technical management. Committers are developers who have write access to the project's source repositories. Committers may cast binding votes on any technical discussion regarding the project.
2. The commiters of Apertium constitute the Assembly of Committers of Apertium
3. The Assembly of Committers of Apertium is the deciding body of the Apertium project
4. The Assembly of Committers elects the Project Management Committee of Apertium every two years or whenever a vacancy occurs
5. One tenth of the Assembly of Commiters may propose a motion of censure to overturn the Project Management Committee, which has to be approved by half plus one of the members of the Assembly of Committers
6. The number of members of the Assembly of Committers of Apertium does not have any limit.
7. Committer access is by invitation only and must be approved by the votes of the half of the members of the Assembly + 1 or well by the votes of all the Project Management Committee.

This might be difficult... having to have a vote each time we add a committer. - Francis Tyers

1. A Committer is considered emeritus by their own declaration or by not contributing in any form to the project for over six months. An emeritus committer may request reinstatement of commit access from the PMC.
2. The president and the secretary of the Project Management Committee will also act as President and Secretary of the assembly of committers
3. The Assembly of Committers decides only on subjects proposed by the Project Management Committee
4. Once submitted to it, the decisions of the Assembly of Committers are executive

Project Management Committee

1. The Project Management Committee is formed by seven members of the Assembly designated by it to make the day to day decisions.
2. The Project Management Committee is headed by a President and has six more members, one of which will act as Secretary, and another one as Treasurer
3. The responsibilities of the Project Management Committee include
   1. Deciding what is distributed as products of Apertium project. In particular, all releases must be approved by the PMC.
   2. Maintaining the project's shared resources, including the codebase repository, mailing lists, websites.
   3. Speaking on behalf of the project.
   4. Resolving license disputes regarding products of the project.
   5. Nominating new Committers.
   6. Maintaining these bylaws and other guidelines of the project.
   7. Promoting the active engagement of Apertium in larger free/open-source initiatives
   8. Attracting external funds to further the objectives of the Project
   9. Deciding how to distribute the funds the Project may get as the result of participating in externally-funded initiatives

1. The Project Management Committee votes all its decisions. The President has a quality vote.
2. The Project Management Committe has the obligation to submit to the Assembly of Committers the decisions that affect the work of the half or more of the members of the Assembly of Committers, being able to consult in other subjects if like this believed it necessary.
3. Decisions of the Project Management Committee takes without consulting to the Assembly are filed in a diary and are periodically presented to the Assembly of Committers, which approves them or rejects them. The period between cannot be longer than a month.

Transitional provisions

1. The initial Assembly of Committers consists of everyone having commit access to the official Apertium code repository at the time that these by-laws are adopted
2. The official Apertium code repository at the time of adopting these bylaws was hosted in SourceForge