Thank you all for your feedback during this process. I spoke with @thadguidry in December, and the latest edits reflect that conversation.
I believe most of us agree that the distributed nature of OpenRefine's community and decision-making process is important, and we do not want to limit anyone's contribution in any form.
We also want to recognize that the Code of Conduct Committee, Advisory Committee, and Core Developer Group carry more authority in the project. These groups can speak on and make commitments on OpenRefine's behalf. Because of this, they should be held to a higher standard of transparency to maintain the community's trust. This includes the following policies:
- Funding requests and management, specifically when funds are managed by Code for Science & Society (CS&S).
- Conflict of interest policies
- Selection processes for new members
As a result, in the latest governance updates, we introduced a Policy section. While policies should be read separately from the governance, we agreed to store them in the same document. This approach helps keep everything easily accessible to the community, as we currently lack a dedicated space for storing them (later this could be a dedicated section on the website, a separate repository, or a shared drive)
I would like to note that at this stage we are provisioning for a Core Developer Group without members. Antonin is leaving the project, and Tom has not engaged in the last four months. This should not prevent us from formalizing this group in the governance; we can leave its membership empty and address this separately.
At this stage, I believe the PR is ready for copy editing and minor review, with any further refinements to be made in separate PRs. Otherwise, I invite everyone to move forward with finalizing the governance update.