[New Process Improvement Need]: Open Source project management / personnel org.

[riverma]

Checked for duplicates

Yes - I've already checked

Category

Governance - people, personnel, organization, etc.

Describe the need

We have a need for best practices on setting up and maintaining open source project and personnel management (+1'd by @awdtinio)

[riverma]

+1’d by @MJJoyce, @galenatjpl, @jeffreypon, @sujen1412, @hookhua

[ewferg]

@ewferg +1 on this task. Here is a recent attempt we are making to build a governance model for Aerie: https://github.com/NASA-AMMOS/aerie/blob/develop/docs/GOVERNANCE.md

[riverma]

Hi @ewferg - thanks for your support and reference to your governance model! It's excellent. I see it was based on some governance approaches for popular OSS projects. I particularly like the explanation of roles and the decision making process.

Couple questions:

• Are there other files / docs other than your GOVERNANCE.md that help explain your project's management approach?
• How do you feel about contributing a template version of your governance approach to SLIM so that it can be built-upon and shared for other projects? Happy to help with that as well!

[riverma]

Actually open question to all here (@MJJoyce, @galenatjpl, @jeffreypon, @sujen1412, @hookhua, @ewferg etc.): which information do you feel is important in describing your open source project management approach and personnel roles / org?

Some ideas gleaned from @ewferg's GOVERNANCE.md example earlier:

• Roles
• Teams
• Decision making process

What else (if anything) are we missing?

[ewferg]

Hey @riverma, great questions.

• Right now there are not other documents specifically related to governance, but I envisioned a couple more that detailed out the operations of the two committees (TSC and PMC). Here is an example from node that I was planning to use as a guide, but I was hoping to modify the operations a bit to be more informal, at least for Aeire. I feel as though our community simply isn't large enough yet to have heavy bylaws that govern our operations, but I could be convinced otherwise. I would be interested to hear from folks who have experience working in other open source communities with involvement from sponsor orgs like AMMOS.
• I would be happy to provide a template based on our version and would definitely be looking for feedback on it. We are just getting started as a community so I still can't tell you how well this governance model works.

[awdtinio]

@riverma, years ago, we conducted an open source path forward study that resulted in a document. There is a section in this document that provides some description of a governance model, which was largely based on Apache. The document resides internally in the MGSS document repo. Let me dig that up and share it with you

[riverma]

Hi @ewferg - thanks for the responses! Definitely agree with you that the verbosity of governance recommendations can often scale against the size of the team considered. Also - excited to hear you're interested in contributing a template! I'd imagine we can be explicit about the size of the team that's appropriate for the template offered.

Perhaps a breakout chat on this topic between yourself, myself and other interested parties might be a good way to digest this info and brainstorm a community recommendation 😀

[riverma]

@riverma, years ago, we conducted an open source path forward study that resulted in a document. There is a section in this document that provides some description of a governance model, which was largely based on Apache. The document resides internally in the MGSS document repo. Let me dig that up and share it with you

Hi @awdtinio - thanks for that reference! I'll scan that over. I'm sure there must be a lot of great lessons learned from that doc, especially the governance section.

[riverma]

Closing as work has been completed. Thanks again to @ewferg .