Revising OpenWrt Rules

[Rich Brown]

I offer the following as a "Release Candidate 1" replacement for the original OpenWrt Rules at https://openwrt.org/rules. I believe they are a fair summary of the responses to my original notes. 

Much of this is a restatement of the original rules, retaining those procedures but making explicit the sense of trust between people that underlies the current rules. 

I did inject a change in establishing a 14-day period for formal votes on the OpenWrt-Admin list. There were two reasons: for agility - to prevent undecided issues from "hanging out there" indefinitely, and also to provide a basis for detecting when we should ask Decisionmakers whether they wish to participate further.

As an RC1 document, further comments are welcome.

Finally, thank you for all the deeply considered responses and for the delightfully respectful discussion. It makes me proud to be a member of the Project.

Rich

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OpenWrt Project Rules - RC1 14Oct2020

1. The OpenWrt Project (the "Project") is governed by a group of Decisionmakers who have demonstrated a long-standing commitment to OpenWrt through high quality contributions of code, documentation, organization, or leadership of the Project.

2. Decisionmakers affect the direction of the Project - product features, code, documentation, governance - by their personal efforts, by proposing changes to other Decisionmakers, and by approving contributions from others. The Project adopts proposals by a majority vote of all Decisionmakers. 

3. OpenWrt's success hinges on the trust of character and judgement developed between Decisionmakers. Because of that trust, the Project can move forward without requiring every Decisionmaker to examine and agree to every decision.

4. A contributor to OpenWrt may become a Decisionmaker when it is obvious that they have a track record of high quality contributions (code, documentation, organizational suggestions, etc.) that enhance the project. After a nomination by a Decisionmaker and second by another, a simple majority vote is required to welcome a new Decisionmaker. The current list of Decisionmakers appears on this page. [Move the current list of "People" from the https://openwrt.org/about page]

5. To ensure that OpenWrt always has a quorum for votes, Decisionmakers are required to remain active in the project. We will develop a process whereby we can remind members of their obligations, and remove them from the list if they no longer wish to participate, or do not participate in votes for three months. 

6. Decisionmakers owe an obligation of transparency to the members of the OpenWrt community. All decisions must be made public on the Project website. To the extent possible (exempting, for example, certain matters such as personnel and security issues), the decision making process should also be conducted in public.

7. Discussions of proposals may take place in any venue: the OpenWrt-Admin list, the OpenWrt-Devel list, the IRC channels, the OpenWrt Forum, and elsewhere. A formal call for a vote on the OpenWrt-Admin list will be held open for 14 days: Decisionmakers must respond (with approve, disapprove, abstain, or a request for more information) in that time frame.

8. Any Decisionmaker may request, and automatically be granted, permission to commit changes to code, the documentation, forum, etc. However, we rely on the judgement of all Decisionmakers to recognize their strengths and we expect they will only request the permissions necessary for their participation.

9. Any infrastructure should be FOSS, whether outsourced or operating on Project servers. Any service requires at least three people with full rights to administer it. Those administrators will be documented publicly.

10. The Project will not provide email accounts to individuals under its domain name.

11. Changes to these rules require a two-thirds majority vote of Decisionmakers. 

12. All OpenWrt community members agree to be nice to each other.