This document defines the project governance for this repository. Most of the
content in this document was copied or adapted from the
moby project's project/GOVERNANCE.md file)
The current maintainers of this repository are listed in the MAINTAINERS.toml file.
There are different types of maintainers, with different responsibilities, but all maintainers have 3 things in common:
- They share responsibility in the project's success.
- They have made a long-term, recurring time investment to improve the project.
- They spend that time doing whatever needs to be done, not necessarily what is the most interesting or fun.
Maintainers are often under-appreciated, because their work is harder to appreciate. It's easy to appreciate a really cool and technically advanced feature. It's harder to appreciate the absence of bugs, the slow but steady improvement in stability, or the reliability of a release process. But those things distinguish a good project from a great one.
Maintainers are first and foremost contributors who have shown their commitment to the long term success of a project. Contributors who want to become maintainers first demonstrate commitment to the project by contributing code and/or hardware design and/or documentation work, reviewing others' work, and triaging issues on a regular basis for at least three months.
The contributions alone don't make you a maintainer. You need to earn the trust of the current maintainers and other project contributors, that your decisions and actions are in the best interest of the project.
Periodically, the existing maintainers curate a list of contributors who have shown regular activity on the project over the prior months. From this list, maintainer candidates are selected and proposed through internal communications among existing maintainers.
After a candidate is proposed through internal communications among maintainers, the existing maintainers will use an informal process to decide whether to approve the candidate as a new maintainer.
If a candidate is approved, a maintainer contacts the candidate to
invite them to open a pull request that adds the contributor to
the MAINTAINERS.toml file. The candidate becomes a maintainer once the pull
request is merged.
Maintainers can be removed from the project either at their own request or due to project inactivity.
Life priorities, interests, and passions can change. If you're a maintainer but feel you must remove yourself from the list, inform other maintainers that you intend to step down, and if possible, help find someone to pick up your work. At the very least, ensure your work can be continued where you left off.
After you've informed other maintainers, create a pull request to remove
yourself from the MAINTAINERS.toml file.
An existing maintainer can be removed if they do not show significant activity on the project. Periodically, the maintainers review the list of maintainers and their activity over an unspecified period.
If a maintainer has shown insufficient activity over this period, a project representative will contact the maintainer to ask if they want to continue being a maintainer. If the maintainer decides to step down as a maintainer, they open a pull request to be removed from the MAINTAINERS file.
If the maintainer wants to continue in this role, but is unable to perform the required duties, this project does not yet have any formal process to remove the maintainer.
Currently, this project is too small to have democratic decision-making. All decisions are made together by the project maintainers and Manu Prakash, the leader of the Prakash Lab, under a Benevolent Dictator approach, using informal ad hoc decision-making processes. As the project matures, decision-making processes may be adjusted to become more formal, accountable, and/or democratic.