Governance Charter
Overview
This document describes the bootstrap governance process under which the project will operate until the final governance process is identified.
Goals
The initial role of the governance committee is to instantiate the formal process for OpenFeature governance. In addition to defining the initial governance process, the bootstrap committee strongly believes that it is important to provide a means for iterating the processes defined by the governance committee. We do not believe that we will get it right the first time, or possibly ever, and won’t even complete the governance development in a single shot. The role of the governance committee is to be a live, responsive body that can refactor and reform as necessary to adapt to a changing project and community.
Governance Committee
The Governance Committee is responsible for representing the project, making a final decision if a consensus cannot be reached (see Decision Making), handling the Code of Conduct escalations, defining and approving with the project members the final governance model, and organizing elections for the elected governance board body.
Governance Committee Members
NOTE: In April 2022 Project Maintainers assigned five seven individuals to be members of the Bootstrap Governance Committee. This is a temporary arrangement that should be replaced by an elected governing body before March 2024.
Technical Committee (TC)
The project has a Technical Committee (TC) that consists of three maintainers who actively contribute to the project. The role of the technical committee is to facilitate development of the OpenFeature specification and other technical decisions in the project. The responsibilities include reviewing the incoming enhancement proposal and pull requests, driving the decision making process and building consensus among the OpenFeature community. At the moment, TC members do not get special permissions beyond what other maintainers have.
TC Members
TC Charter
The technical committee is initially bootstrapped by 3 contributors based on the consensus of contributors and maintainers of the project. Their term is one year. Then the technical committee members are re-elected based on the public nomination and decision making process. The same happens when a TC member steps down from the role in the middle of the term, an acting TC member is appointed by the community until the end of the term.
At any time, less than 50% of the TC members can be affiliated with a single company. If the affiliation changes during the term and violates the rule, one of the TC members should step down.
Decision making
Decisions are made by a consensus of Project Members and Interested Parties. If this consensus cannot be reached, the decision can be made by the plain majority vote of Bootstrap Governance Committee Members.
Key discussions and decisions should happen asynchronously in communication channels like GitHub Issues, discussions or pull requests. Technical decisions are expected to be documented in the OpenFeature Specification. The community decisions should be documented in this Governance repository.
Meetings
The project conducts regular project meetings hosted by its maintainers and contributors. These meetings are used as additional discussion and consensus building but not for making decisions without prior discussion in async channels.
Project roles
The following project roles are defined at the moment: Community Participant, Contributor, Organization Member, Triager, Approver, Maintainer, Technical Committee Member, Bootstrap Governance Committee Member. These roles are defined below.
See Contributor Ladder for additional information.
In addition to the elected maintainer roles, 3 individuals get the maintainer status at the inception of the project:
- Michael Beemer, @beeme1mr, Dynatrace
- Alois Reitbauer, @AloisReitbauer, Dynatrace/CNCF/Keptn
- Oleg Nenashev, @oleg-nenashev, Dynatrace/CDF/Jenkins/Keptn
Bootstrap Governance Committee Members
⚠️ This is a temporary role while the bootstrap governance is active. In the future this role will be replaced by an elected Governance Committee Member role.
Bootstrap Governance Committee members are responsible for representing the project in communications with organizations, including but not limited to contributor companies, adopters, vendors and foundations. Apart from the representative role, they can make a final decision when a consensus cannot be reached.
In April 2022 this role will be assigned by project maintainers to seven individuals listed in Interested Parties. Each company/organization should have less than 50% of the seats, and hence an organization can have only up to three seats. The project maintainers are also responsible to review their nominations with the community, and to do the best effort to address any feedback/concerns.