Re: Turning GNU into a bottom-up organization

[Mark Wielaard]

On Tue, 2019-10-22 at 14:00 -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 1:55 PM DJ Delorie <dj@delorie.com> wrote:
> > Even if we all agree on the "big picture simple answer" the details and
> > "best practices" are just as important.
> > 
> > Do you have any suggestions for filling in these details?
> 
> The day-to-day running of things should certainly be documented somewhere.
> 
> I have suggested wiki.gnu.org as a central place where the community
> can come together and document best practice.
> 
> Even if the wiki is eventually codified into a real manual, it has to
> start somewhere and grow from there.

Having a central place for a collection of "how this GNU project is
run" examples is a good thing. But I am not sure every project really
follows the same kind of decision making process. Although there are
probably a couple of roles that have somewhat clear rights and
responsibilities (contributors, developers, committers,
uploaders/release managers, project maintainers) that might be similar
for most projects. A lot of the details depend on the size of the
developer community and how you split things up when the project grows.
Do you create sub-components with subsystem maintainers or really
separate sub-projects with with their own (co)-maintainers? Do you have
global maintainers/reviewers or a global/subsystem consensus model? So
if we do turn that a "manual" I think it should be in the form of
governance templates for how you could organize (and grow) a GNU
project, which a project can then adopt and adjust to their specific
community situation.

Cheers,

Mark