diff --git a/GOVERNANCE.md b/GOVERNANCE.md index 6c251b077bc7..f838b97be70a 100644 --- a/GOVERNANCE.md +++ b/GOVERNANCE.md @@ -65,7 +65,7 @@ Code contributions are very welcome, but in order to streamline and harmonize co Among contributors, some have maintainer status, which consists in rights (write access to the [RIOT GitHub repository](https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/)) and duties. The current maintainers can be found in the [maintainers list]. -The duties of a maintainer include the following: Maintainers are people who care about RIOT and want to help it grow and improve. +Maintainers are people who care about RIOT and want to help it grow and improve. A maintainer is not just someone who can make changes, but someone who has demonstrated their ability to collaborate with the team, get the most knowledgeable people to review code and docs, contribute high-quality code, and follow through to fix issues (in code or tests). More on maintaining RIOT can be found in the [maintaining guidelines]. @@ -78,21 +78,21 @@ To contact maintainers, the best is to interact over actual RIOT code on [GitHub Maintainers can propose to give maintainer status to contributors that have been noticed as particularly active in some domain of RIOT. The decision to grant this status is then taken via consensus among the maintainers. -If there is consensus on granting the status to a particular contributor, a maintainer will contact personally this contributor to propose the status, which the contributor can then accept (or turn down). +If there is consensus on granting the status to a particular contributor, a maintainer will personally contact this contributor with the proposal, which the contributor can then accept (or turn down). Maintainers who are selected will be - invited to the [maintainers GitHub team] by one of the admins of the RIOT project, which grants them the necessary GitHub rights, -- invited to the maintainer forum group by the forum moderators, which will give them access to the private maintainer forum, and -- invited to the private RIOT-maintainer chat room by one of the moderators of that room, for more informal exchanges between maintainers. +- invited to the maintainer forum group by the forum moderators, which will give them access to the (private) maintainer part of the forum, and +- invited to the private RIOT-maintainer chat room by one of the moderators of that room, for more informal exchanges between maintainers. #### Removing a Maintainer Maintainers may resign at any time if they feel that they will not be able to continue fulfilling their project duties. -Maintainers may also be removed after being inactive, failure to fulfill their -Maintainer responsibilities, violating the Code of Conduct, or other reasons. +Maintainers may also be removed after being inactive, upon failure to fulfill their +Maintainer responsibilities, because of violating the Code of Conduct, or for other reasons. Inactivity is defined as a period of very low or no activity in the project. A yearly maintainer ping, an e-mail sent to inactive maintainers, determines if the maintainer is still willing to fulfill their project duties. On failure to reply to the maintainer ping within the specified amount of time (usually a month), the maintainer will be removed. @@ -103,7 +103,7 @@ Release managers make sure the quarterly release comes out in time. They are one or more maintainers which were appointed for a specific release by the Virtual Maintainer Assembly (VMA). Their duties include setting the dates for feature freeze for the release, enforcing the feature freeze, coordinating the (mostly automated) tests of a release, writing the release notes and creating the tags defining the release and its release candidates. The full set of tasks can be found in the document [Managing a Release]. -Their duties end, once the release is out or if all bug-fixing point releases are out. +Their duties end once the release is out or if all bug-fixing point releases are out. ### Admins @@ -115,7 +115,7 @@ Beyond those technical duties and access rights, they do not have any special ri They are picked by the maintainers, usually based on seniority. The maintainers try to take care to spread the admin responsibility over several organizations within the maintainer body. -There are also admins on the other RIOT discussion platforms, beyond technical administrative duties they do not have any special rights. +There are also admins on the other RIOT discussion platforms. Beyond technical administrative duties they do not have any special rights. These admins usually are appointed or self-appointed on merrit, i.e., whoever sets up the platform usually is (one of) its admin(s). ### GitHub Owners @@ -160,11 +160,11 @@ On decisions regarding a release, the release manager(s) take this position. ## Meetings -There are 3 types of meetings that maintainers may participate in: +There are three types of regular meetings within the RIOT community: - The annual General Assembly (GA), - The quarterly Virtual Maintainer Assembly (VMA), and -- and the Weekly Coordinational Meeting. +- The Weekly Coordinational Meeting. The GA is public and anyone who sees themselves as a member of the RIOT community can participate. Larger community steering decisions for the community are made during the GA, e.g., electing contact people for the Code of Conduct. @@ -176,12 +176,12 @@ The agenda for the GA is collected before the assembly but may be bashed at the The Virtual Maintainer Assembly (VMA) is a closed meeting among maintainers. The VMA appoints the release manager for upcoming releases and the moderator for the next VMA. Other maintenance decisions such as the fate of larger sections of code are discussed after these administrative tasks are done. -The VMA usually takes place about a month after the latest release, usually in a virtual space, such as a video conference, the VMA moderator polls the maintainers for a sufficient date around the date of the upcoming release. -The VMA may or may not co-incide with the GA, usually the VMA moderator decides, however, to merge these two meetings. +The VMA usually takes place about a month after the latest release, usually in a virtual space, such as a video conference. +The VMA moderator polls the maintainers for a sufficient date around the date of the upcoming release. +Every forth VMA may or may not co-incide with the GA. However, the VMA moderator usually decides to merge these two meetings. In this case, VMA moderator and RIOT Summit organizers decide together on who is moderating the joint event (it may be the VMA moderator, it may be someone else). The agenda for the VMA is collected before the assembly but may be bashed at the start of the meeting. The notes of the VMA will be published publicly in the RIOT forum. -The agenda for the VMA is collected before the assembly but may be bashed at the start of the meeting. The Weekly Coordinational Meeting is a closed meeting among maintainers. It usually serves as a small communal get-together of maintainers on a regular basis. @@ -196,14 +196,13 @@ If one of the appointees to that list (see GA notes for the members of that list ## Security Response Team -The Maintainers will appoint a Security Response Team to handle security reports. +The maintainers will appoint a Security Response Team to handle security reports. This committee may simply consist of the maintainers themselves. - The Security Response Team is responsible for handling all reports of security holes and breaches according to the [security policy]. ## Modifying this Charter -Changes to this Governance and its supporting documents require the approval of at least 4 maintainers who all must be employed by or associated with different organizations. +Changes to this Governance and its supporting documents require the approval of at least four maintainers who all must be employed by or associated with different organizations. [RFC7228]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7228 [draft-ietf-iotops-7228bis]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-iotops-7228bis/