[Mageia-discuss] Mageia governance model draft

Romain d'Alverny rdalverny at gmail.com
Mon Oct 4 15:26:39 CEST 2010


Hi everyone,

it's been two weeks now since we announced Mageia and, again, thank you.

We are still amazed by the amount of contributions, discussions and enthusiasm
here. We hope it will enable us to build a strong, great Linux distribution
that benefits users, upstream and adjacent projects.

As well as working on/setting up the legal side, founding docs, the very first
pieces of infrastructure, meeting people, we have discussed and thought about
the governance model for the project. Here is the result.

It is not a rigid structure and we are definitely open to comments and
adjustements as things go (hence the "draft"); but we do mean to start
with this schema for the first year.

As stated in the announcement, this model has two targets:

 * ensure that the project direction & management is done by volunteer people
   that are recognized by their peers as having valuable role and insight
   into the project (no 3rd party take-over);

 * enable the project to learn and improve on itself.


Of course, that only won't prevent heated discussions, decisions to be taken
(and justified) or failure - all this construction will only work because of
reciprocal trust, goodwill and desire of all participants, plus a working schema
for discussion, decision and conflict resolution.

To summarize, the whole project is organized in several groups:

 * Mageia project Teams (developers, packagers, docs, translators, designers,
   etc. sponsored/mentored from the whole community),

 * Mageia project Community Council (people elected from each team),

 * Mageia association members (basically, founding association members & past
   members of the council who can be on and elect the board),

 * Mageia project & association Board (direction of the project).


Because things are organized this way does not mean that there is a strict
hierarchical relationship between entities. This governance model is here
to coordinate the work of everyone and identify who is in charge of what.

Here is the doc: http://mageia.org/wiki/doku.php?id=org


Now, having read all this, beyond other discussion, here is a little point
about Teams, where actually everything starts; here are teams we have already
on the wiki:
 * Packaging team
   * Security team
 * Developers team
 * Documentation team
 * Translation team
 * QA team
 * Triage team
 * Users communities management and representation team; this one is pretty
   big so it may need to organize into three dedicated groups:
   * forums
   * mailing-lists
   * IRC
   * local groups
 * Web team
 * Designers
 * Marketing team
 * Communication team


That makes for a lot of people; about 300 at this time if we count everyone
who enlisted.

Now, this is practically a bit odd for a start, of course, since no team exist
formally yet. So we will go to freeze today's list of members of each team
and those will be the first round teams.

Each team will have to decide on itself, for the next two weeks:

 * what is in the mentoring program exactly (for instance, Packaging team
   has to take into account alternative packaging practices and explain
   why/how it is expected to work in Mageia and how it could evolve);

 * how/who to sponsor (don't sponsor just a good friend, but someone who
   can bring great things to your team and the project);

 * for their Council Representative, Team leader and Team backup;

 * for a list of ranked work topics to submit to the Council and Board
   for the project and for the first distribution release (we will
   announce Board's plans about that a bit later); these will be sorted
   through for the long-term roadmap and will help to get a picture
   of what we could do; see see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoSCoW_Method
   for simple priorities;

 * propose/ask the tools they would need to explore/use to work collectively
   (in- and cross-teams; see at the end of this post).


Ok... This is already a LOT of information. We may post more specific
discussion about:
 * Community Council and Board roles, Board nomination and communication
   channels (all lists are not active for now);
 * Teams sponsoring/mentoring process, election and constitution process;
 * tools; again, this is a per-team definition but we can certainly share
   that;
 * something else?

Your input is welcome and PLEASE:
 * quote the original message,
 * use text-only,
 * be specific in your answers.

Cheers,

Romain


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