[Numpy-discussion] Readings about governance and decision making for F/OSS projects

[Nathaniel Smith]

Hi all,

As discussed on the call yesterday, here's some links to background
reading on F/OSS project governance, to use as background reading for
our discussion Tuesday. There's a lot out there, but here are the two
I think are the most important/relevant:

The classic book on running a F/OSS project is Karl Fogel's "Producing
OSS", which is available free online. Chapter 4 is the relevant one
for this topic (though the whole book is worth reading):
  http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#social-infrastructure

The IPython governance documents are here:
  https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/IPEP-29:-Project-Governance

I think it will give us a really good start on Tuesday if everyone is
able to find the time to read Chapter 4 + IPEP 29 ahead of time.
Something to do on the plane, maybe :-).

---

For extra credit, some less crucial links that still might be
interesting (and give something of a sense of the range of options):

The Apache voting system:
  http://www.apache.org/foundation/voting.html

The GNOME foundation's governance documents:
  https://www.gnome.org/foundation/governance/

The Debian constitution, esp. section 6 (the technical committee):
  https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution
  https://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte

The GCC steering committee:
  https://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/steering.html

The Node.JS foundation (interesting case -- a foundation in the
process of bootstrapping in order to resolve a fork triggered by
conflict between outside contributors and the company that started the
project):
  https://nodejs.org/foundation/

Jono Bacon's book "The Art of Community", also available free online:
  http://artofcommunityonline.org/Art_of_Community_Second_Edition.pdf
The governance chapter here is much more oriented towards Ubuntu-sized
projects with hundreds-to-thousands of contributors, so not as
relevant for us, but it still contains lots of interesting stuff.

If you have other links on this topic that you are think are
interesting, please add them to the thread!

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org