Governance¶
This chapter describes how decisions are made in postmarketOS, and the structure of groups and teams who make them.
Making decisions¶
As any FOSS project, most day-to-day decisions are taken by those people responsible of whatever is being changed: device maintainers approve changes to their devices, designers take care of artwork decisions, infra changes are reviewed by the infra team, etc. Those decisions are governed by team and merge rules specific to each component of the project.
However, there are decisions where everybody with rights in the project should have a say. Some examples are: the approval of the yearly budget, changing the mission statement, or making big changes to the Code of Conduct. Those decisions have a greater impact on everybody, and follow a stricter process. These are project-wide decisions.
Project-wide decisions¶
Project-wide decisions are decisions taken by Trusted and Core Contributors, collectively described as the Assembly.
A decision needs to be taken by the Assembly instead of by the relevant maintainers only if it is documented as such in the corresponding process.
Project-wide decisions are democratic in nature, following the rule: one person, one vote. By default, decisions:
Are not anonymous by default, though some circumstances (e.g. accepting new members) may require anonymous voting.
Require the endorsement of 10% of the Assembly before being put to vote.
Should have been available for all Assembly members and discussed in a team meeting before being put to a vote.
Should be open for voting for 1 week.
Require a majority of positive votes to pass.
Specific processes or decisions might modify the previous conditions.
Currently, the voting is done using the polls project, or Nextcloud Forms when missing features are required. However, the voting platforms are not relevant for this document and might be changed at any time.