web-platform-tests Governance

Since its inception until earlier this year, web-platform-tests was run
under the purview of the W3C, with a loose, informal, decision making
process. Recently the project moved into its own GitHub organisation,
but the informal process for making decisions remains.

Although such a model has got us this far, the increased importance of
web-platform-tests means that it's time we revisited the governance
model. We need to come up with a more formalised system that makes it
clear who is ultimately responsible for making project-wide decisions,
and ensuring that those decisions reflect the needs of the wpt community.

The possible governance models have been discussed in GitHub issue 11473
[1]. Following those discussions, the plan is to adopt a model that is
heavily influenced by the Rust community: with a core team of active
contributors who are responsible for setting the overall project
direction, and ultimately responsible for making final decisions in the
case of controversy.

To ensure that everyone has an opportunity to give feedback on decisions
that impact them, all issues will broad impact (e.g. API changes) will
have to go through an RFC process [2] in which all arguments for and
against the changes are made in public, and any final decision will be
made purely on the basis of such arguments. In addition, the core team
may choose to delegate authority for specific areas to a sub-team, in
order to better distribute the decision making.

Assuming there are not fundamental objections to the proposed model, we
need to get the ball rolling by choosing an initial core team, which
will consist of about 5 members who are active contributors representing
a wide cross-section of the wpt community. In order to do this we
propose a three step process:

* Prospective members nominate themselves

* If possible a mutually agreeable decision is made from the pool of 
nominees

* In the case that no such decision is made we delegate to a neutral third
party, who is not a nominee, in order to determine the final composition
of the team.

For this purpose Marcos Cáceres has agreed to take the role of neutral
observer. Hopefully this choice is acceptable to everyone involved, but
if this is problematic, please raise your concerns and we will attempt
to rectify the issue.

With TPAC forthcoming it is desirable to make some progress on this
before the face to face meetings, so we ask that nominations are made
before this Friday 19th October. In order to nominate yourself for
membership please fill out the following Google form:
https://goo.gl/forms/YrQJCGaikKDBWXyp2

James Graham, Philip Jägenstedt, Marcos Cáceres

[1] https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/issues/11473
[2] https://github.com/foolip/rfcs (proposed, not yet in effect)

Received on Tuesday, 16 October 2018 09:01:44 UTC