This document officially structures the role of the eZ Publish Community Project Board. The Board is the main organ governing the evolution of the eZ Publish Community Project.
Responsibilities
- Project values : make sure the project seeks to maintain a set of core values (openness, innovation)
- Direction : long-term direction of the project, and synchronisation with eZ Systems' roadmap
- Approving/Rejecting board members
- Release governance
- Granting commit rights and intermediate levels
- Synchronisation with the Zeta Components project
- Synchronisation with the Translation project
- Maintain a good momentum (regular meetings on/offline)
Example :
The first decision could be about defining the way Community members can participate to the project, the various roles and prerequisites.
Initial body
From eZ :
- One Engineering team representative
- One Expert Consulting representative
- Nicolas Pastorino ( Community Manager )
From the Community : to be decided, 3 members.
The board will constitute of 6 members. We can imagine making it a 7 person group, the 7th person being a Community Member. This should happen once the global organisation is settled, to increase the capacity of the Board as a decision-making organ.
Forming the initial board will require applicants to fulfil the Recruitment criteria below. Applications will be opened and triaged once this framework document is widely acknowledged.
Recruitment
The board has the responsibility to triage Board membership applications. When nearing the end of one or several members term, an open application period must be opened during a sufficiently long period of time, gathering applications. At the end of this period, applications will be matched against the list of criteria below, and replacing members will be elected by the Board after an open call for applications.
To ensure a fair triage of applications, a set of criteria needs to be setup. Here is the list of criteria which need to be fulfilled to become a Board member.
- Have listening skills
- Be unbiased and objective
- Be detail-oriented, not necessarily perfectionist
- Be able to dedicate time to the role of board member
- Be a certified eZ Publish developer
- Prove an experienced participation to the eZ Community (clear figures will be decided for this, after the formation of the initial body, for all subsequent recruitings), or to other Open Source Software communities.
Global criteria also apply :
- Reserve a seat for a functional profile
- The Board body should be representative of eZ Publish’s market and geographical distribution.
Members should be elected for a one-year term. The Board reserves the possibility to alter the term duration. As an example of alternative, board members of the Fedora project are in place for a specific number of releases. The term is release-based, and not time-based.
Decision/vote system
Majority vote will be used for Board decisions. Having an even number of members ensures a nice balance between Community members and eZ insiders. This can however lead to blocking situations, which will harm the speed and efficiency of the Board in making decisions.
In order to prevent this, a Chairman will be named by eZ. It is very likely that the chairman will be the Community Manager, natural interface between the Community and eZ, having one foot on each side. The Chairman will be granted a double vote capacity, increasing the weight of his neutral voice.
Interactions between this Board and the rest of the Community ( and eZ )
A transparent interaction between the Board and the rest of the Community is key. It should happen both ways. The Community Project Board members, as ambassadors of eZ Publish towards the Community, should participate to the community's life. This can take the form of presence on events, talks. It is also very likely that the Board as an entity, and/or individual Board members will maintain blogs, enacting openness and transparency on a daily basis. That is for the outbound way.
The other way around, it should be straight-forward to get in touch with the board to send requests, make remarks, propose enhancements to processes, etc. The contact channels with the Board will be clearly identified and communicated about, opening wide to communication.
The Board itself will make final decisions on this, but the above can be iterated on to quickly set up the necessary communication channels.