Create governance document

[nathanshammah]

The current QuTiP admin team (@quantshah, @BoxiLi, @ajgpitch, @Ericgig, @nwlambert, and @nathanshammah) has been working on a governance model and document in the past few months. We'd like to propose this to the broader QuTiP community of contributors and users. The main takeaway is that QuTiP has grown enormously in use in the past few years, thanks to the work of its creators, @jrjohansson and @nonhermitian, and a devoted group of core developers (among whose: @arnelg, @cgranade and many others), as well as now, over 80 contributors to the main qutip/qutip repository, as well as all the help on qutip-notebooks, qutip-doc, and qutip.github.io as well as the other packages that are now being spin out in the QuTiP Github organization to avoid feature creeps. Not to mention all the help provided in Qutip's google group, a forum for bugs, physics questions and research ideas. Over the years, the QuTiP project has enabled a large ecosystem of supported libraries, such as Krotov (cc @goerz and others), pyEPR (cc @zlatko-minev), scqubits (cc @jkochNU), and many others.

With this governance model, we'd like to keep doing what we're doing, with the support, since 2018, of @NumFOCUS, which supports scientific open source projects, and, from now on, the additional support of @unitaryfund, a non-profit that supports open-source projects in quantum technologies.

Below we reproduce a governance document that we will add to a new repository at github.com/qutip/governance. We are looking forward to help the growth of the user community, engage it with code contributions and bug reports, and make this awesome scientific open-source project even more sustainable. We will update all related information at github.com/qutip/governance, on QuTiP website's news section (http://qutip.org/news.html) and on the QuTiP google group (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/qutip).

Timeline regarding governance talks:

• April 2018: QuTiP Joins NumFOCUS as an Affiliated Project (and since then participates in Google Summer of Code).
• September 2018: a slide presentation is shared among lead developers with ideas on QuTiP development and governance. (Link)
• February 2019: The first QuTiP developers workshop is held in RIKEN, Wako, Japan, to discuss development and roadmap (Link)
• 2019-2020: Seminars given in USA, Asia, and Europe about QuTiP and how the users community can get more engaged, collecting feedback on the package and project.
• April-May 2020: Discussions for governance creation are revamped
• May-August 2020: First draft document created and circulated among core developers and project creators.
• Fall 2020: Feedback from NumFOCUS, Unitary Fund, update on the governance document.

[nathanshammah]

Accepted @ajgpitch comment and edited from "fiscally sponsored" to "affiliated" project of Unitary Fund as per related discussion. We approved the document already, but having the PR reviewed & approved on Github by @ajgpitch @quantshah @nwlambert @BoxiLi @Ericgig would be nice.

[nathanshammah]

Thank you all, just merged!