User:ScoopGracie/PMC/Proposed bylaws

THESE ARE NOT THE BYLAWS! I'm running for PMC, and these are my suggestion. If you have any feedback, please let me know!

Mission

1. The mission of the Apertium project is to collaboratively develop free/open-source machine translation for as many languages as possible, and in particular:
   1. To give everyone free, unlimited access to the best possible machine-translation technologies.
   2. To maintain a modular, documented, open platform for machine translation and other human language processing tasks
   3. To favour the interchange and reuse of existing linguistic data.
   4. To make integration with other free/open-source technologies easier.
   5. To radically guarantee the reproducibility of machine translation and natural language processing research

Roles and responsibilities

Users

2. 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
3. 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.

Developers

4. Developers are volunteers who are contributing time, code, documentation, or resources to Apertium. A developer that makes sustained, welcomed 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

5. The project's Committers are responsible for the project's technical management. Committers are developers who have write access to any of the project's source repositories, or who could otherwise be reasonably considered active developers. Committers may cast binding votes on any technical discussion regarding the project.
6. The committers of Apertium constitute the Assembly of Committers of Apertium.
7. The Assembly of Committers of Apertium is the deciding body of the Apertium project.
8. The Assembly of Committers elects the Project Management Committee of Apertium every two years or whenever a vacancy occurs, whether by resignation, committer emeritus status, or censure.
9. One tenth of the Assembly of Commiters may propose a motion of censure to overturn the Project Management Committee or any one or more member(s), which must be approved by half plus one of the members of the Assembly of Committers.
10. The Assembly of Committers must censure the entire Project Management Committee if it has not been acting in accordance with these bylaws.
11. The number of members of the Assembly of Committers of Apertium does not have any limit.
12. A Committer is considered emeritus by his or her own declaration or by not contributing in any form to the project for over six months. An emeritus committer may regain committer rights by simply contributing to the project.
13. The President of the Project Management Committee will, immediately after a new PMC begins functioning, nominate a President of the Assembly of Committers, who must be a Committer and may not be a member of the PMC or of the latest election board. This President will be confirmed by a vote of the Assembly of Committers.
14. The Assembly of Committers decides only on subjects proposed by the Project Management Committee.
15. Once submitted to it, the decisions of the Assembly of Committers are final and binding and cannot be overturned, except as explicitly noted in these Bylaws.
16. One tenth of the Assembly of Committers may decide to attempt to overturn a decision of the Assembly of Committers or Project Management Committee, and the resolution must be passed by half plus one of the committers.

Project Management Committee

17. The Project Management Committee is formed by seven members of the Assembly designated by it to make the day to day decisions.
18. The Project Management Committee is headed by a President and has six more members, one of whom will act as Secretary, and another one as Treasurer.
19. 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; although, the PMC could give the right to speak on behalf of Apertium to a member of the Assembly of Committers.
4. Resolving licence disputes regarding products of the project.
5. Maintaining these bylaws and other guidelines of the project.
6. Promoting the active engagement of Apertium in larger free/open-source initiatives
7. Attracting external funds to further the objectives of the Apertium project
8. Deciding how to distribute the funds the Apertium project may get as the result of participating in externally-funded initiatives
20. The Project Management Committee votes on all of its decisions. The President has the casting vote.
21. The Project Management Committee 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.
22. Decisions of the Project Management Committee made other than in consultation with the Assembly are filed in a public diary. The Assembly of Committers may overturn a PMC decision as described in Bylaw 15.
23. The secretary of the Project Management Committee has the obligation of preparing the diary and presenting it to the Assembly of Committers.

Election of the Project Management Committee

24. The Assembly of Committers will elect a new Project Management Committee as follows:
    1. An Election Board of 3 committers (with one substitute each) will run the election.
    2. The Project Management Committee will provide the Election Board with all the information needed to run the election
    3. Any Committer may run for member of the Project Management Committee
    4. Any Committer may run for president of the Project Management Committee
    5. Candidates cannot be part of the Election Board
    6. When an election is called, the Election Board will publish a temporary census of Committers with right to vote will be published.
    7. After 7 days to amend the census, a definitive census of Committers with right to vote will be published by the Election Board
    8. There will be 7 days for candidates to member and president to come forward
    9. The Election Board will proclaim the candidates to President and to Members of the Project Management Committee
    10. Once candidates are proclaimed, Committers with the right to vote will send a ballot with:
        1. The name of a candidate to president of the Project Management Committee, and
        2. The name of up to four candidates to members of the Project Management Committee
    11. There will be 7 days to send the ballots
    12. The Election Board will proclaim as President the candidate to president having received most votes and as members the six candidates to member having received the most votes
    13. The new Project Management Committee will start to function a week after being proclaimed

Amendments

25. To begin the bylaw amendment process, one tenth of the Assembly of Committers must submit a proposal to the PMC.
26. If the PMC accepts an amendment, the Assembly of Committers shall vote on the amendment.
27. If half plus one of the Assembly of Committers accept the amendment, it shall become part of these Bylaws.

Transitional provisions

28. Bylaw 16 does not apply to the acceptance of these bylaws.
29. All PMC or Assembly decisions made prior to the acceptance of these bylaws are final, and Bylaw 16 does not apply to these decisions.