Thanks Martin. I like the return to an Apache style governance system. I'll try to review in more detail in the next few days, but since you said there was a meeting Aug. 29, I wanted to provide some initial feedback. Apologies for the brevity.
- I know it's just a draft, but I hope it can continue to be streamlined and simplified
- committer vs contributor has a very specific definition on Github. Committers have the ability to approve and merge pull requests. Contributors can do a wide variety of tasks including opening pull requests (code or documentation), translation, peer support, issue triage, marketing, etc
- the draft seems to conflate recognition of contributors (which is a nice thing) with granting privileges to them (which is a necessary thing)
- voting should be amongst the members of the group being joined, so no techies voting on membership in the marketing committee or vice versa.
- two merged PRs is too low a bar for being granted commit privileges. The committers should decide what the bar is, but I think it'll be more like "demonstrated technical ability and willingness to follow team guidelines." Some developers might meet this bar immediately, while others might take some time to be ready.
- the concept of "working group" seems fuzzy to me. Some of the things listed seem like individual roles (e.g. release manager) rather than groups and others should be open to anyone who wants to pitch in without any barriers to entry (e.g. peer support)
- issue triage doesn't need to be done by developers. It would be a great way for someone who's familiar with the product, but not necessarily technical, to contribute. It would be nice to have enough help here that we could set a goal like "all issues will be acknowledged/triaged within N days" where N is TBD.
- requiring forum moderators to transfer issues to Github introduces a bottleneck and doesn't scale. The users should do this themselves and we should have the necessary supporting documentation in place to make it straightforward for them to do this.
- I think we currently accept translations from anyone. We could make this more restrictive, but I don't think we've had any issues so far.
I think it's a great beginning and I hope others will offer feedback on it.
Tom