By-laws/Draft

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 the project's source repositories. Committers may cast binding votes on any technical discussion regarding the project.
6. The commiters 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
9. 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
10. The number of members of the Assembly of Committers of Apertium does not have any limit.
11. Committer access is received by committing code and getting sponsorship by two existing Committers, a nominator and a seconder. Upon fulfillment of these conditions, a PMC member will give write access.
12. 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.
13. The president and the secretary of the Project Management Committee will also act as President and Secretary 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 executive

Project Management Committee

16. The Project Management Committee is formed by seven members of the Assembly designated by it to make the day to day decisions.
17. 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
18. 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 exceptionally 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. Giving access rights to 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 Apertium project
9. Deciding how to distribute the funds the Apertium project may get as the result of participating in externally-funded initiatives
19. The Project Management Committee votes on all of its decisions. The President has the casting vote.
20. 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.
21. Decisions of the Project Management Committee made other than in consultation with 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 three months.
22. 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

23. 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

Transitional provisions

24. As soon as these by-laws are approved by the Assembly of Committers, a new Project Management Committee will be elected
25. 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
26. The official Apertium code repository at the time of adopting these bylaws was hosted in SourceForge

Todo

These by-laws need to be amended for two purposes:

1. The procedures, terms, etc. need to change to reflect the migration to GitHub.
2. Some items are ambiguous or unclear and need to be better worded.

Specific things to do:

• Revamp the Developers, Committers, and PMC sections to reflect the GitHub structure
  • rename: Outside Collaborators, Organization Members, Organization Owners
  • what is a 'repository'?
  • permissions and responsibilities (N.B. voting rights to Members)
  • how someone becomes a Outside Collaborator or a Organization Member
• Add the concept of 'package maintainers':
  • who they are (repository admins)
  • how they are established, disestablished, and who does their job if they don't exist
  • their permissions and responsibilities (N.B. releases)
• Add the concept of 'teams' and 'team maintainers':
  • how they are established and disestablished
  • their permissions and responsibilities
• (optional, maybe not right now) Make the election wording less ambiguous