Governance
Revision as of 09:26, 19 January 2009 by 172.22.0.160 (talk)
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?
