[Governance] Bring together governance docs from cool projects

[RichardLitt]

We need to figure out how to have a good governance plan!

So, I'm asking: can we each come up with three projects whose (hopefully) minimal governance we would like to look at together to see what they use, so we can copy it?

I'll start:

• PythonNZ. They have really excellent financial transparency.
• Gnome Foundation. I may be biased here, as I am the Interim Executive Director.
• UnifiedJS. @wooorm has been doing great work here setting up a way to not be a BDFL, and I think we should look at it closely.

[Ly0n]

Thanks @RichardLitt for getting this off the ground.

I have to admit that my hands-on experience with open source governance (from a process/methodology point of view) is limited, so at the moment I do not feel comfortable deciding what I prefer here. So far we have just decided things based on discussion, depending on who has the best arguments for this and that. Another limiting factor has just been the time and interest people bring to the projects. If more than 1 person had the skills, interest and time to do A instead of B, we did it. The whole project was really just driven by people's intrinsic motivation rather than what was decided or a 100% clear roadmap. In order to continue to grow, we should definitely get more structure but at the same time not lose the creativity and fun in what we are doing.

So I did some research on the methodology in general. Here are some good sources that I will read over the next few days to decide what kind of governance plan I favour:

1. https://governingopen.com/
2. https://github.com/github/MVG
3. https://opensource.guide/leadership-and-governance/

If you know of any other content that should be read, please let me know. I had hoped to find more high quality material, but much of the content seems to be heavily biased by one organisation or another.

[RichardLitt]

Here are some good sources that I will read over the next few days to decide what kind of governance plan I favour:

I would worry less about what you favor, and think a bit more about what works best for the entire team, and to see what they think. I do not think there is another way to do this. Top-down approaches to instituting governance don't get buy-in the same way.