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DECISION-MAKING.md

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Decision-making rules

Introduction

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) community set out the following decision-making rules with the intention to:

  • Strive for consensus.
  • Promote open discussions.
  • Minimize the administrative burden.
  • Provide a path for when consensus cannot be made.
  • Grow the community.
  • Maximize the bus factor of the project.

The rules outlined below are inspired by the lazy consensus system used in the Apache Foundation and heavily depends on GitHub Pull Request Review system.

Definitions

Repository - https://github.com/bids-standard/bids-specification

Contributor - a person listed in the Appendix I: Contributors. The community decides on the content of this file using the same process as any other change to the Repository (see below) allowing the meaning of "Contributor" to evolve independently of the Decision-making rules.

Maintainer - a Contributor responsible for the long term health of the project and the community. Maintainers have additional rights (see Rules) helping them to resolve conflicts and increase the pace of the development when necessary. Current Maintainers:

Name Time commitment
Stefan Appelhoff (@sappelhoff) 5h/week

Rules

  1. Every modification of the specification (including a correction of a typo, adding a new Contributor, an extension adding support for a new data type, or others) or proposal to release a new version needs to be done via a Pull Request (PR) to the Repository.
  2. Anyone can open a PR (this action is not limited to Contributors).
  3. PRs adding new Contributors must also add their GitHub names to the CODEOWNERS file.
  4. A PR is eligible to be merged if and only if these conditions are met:
    1. The last commit is at least 5 working days old to allow the community to evaluate it.
    2. The PR features at least two Reviews that Approve the PR from Contributors of which neither is the author of the PR. The reviews need to be made after the last commit in the PR (equivalent to Stale review dismissal option on GitHub).
    3. Does not feature any Reviews that Request changes.
    4. Does not feature "WIP" in the title (Work in Progress).
    5. Passes all automated tests.
    6. Is not proposing a new release or has been approved by at least one Maintainer (i.e., PRs proposing new releases need to be approved by at least one Maintainer).
  5. A Maintainer can merge any PR - even if it's not eligible to merge according to Rule 4.
  6. Any Contributor can Review a PR and Request changes. If a Contributor Request changes they need to provide an explanation what changes should be added and justification of their importance. Reviews requesting changes can also be used to request more time to review a PR.
  7. A Contributor that Requested changes can Dismiss their own review or Approve changes added by the Contributor who opened the PR.
  8. If the author of a PR and Contributor who provided Review that Requests changes cannot find a solution that would lead to the Contributor dismissing their review or accepting the changes the Review can be Dismissed with a vote or by a Maintainer. Rules governing voting:
    1. A Vote can be triggered by any Contributor, but only after 5 working days from the time a Review Requesting Changes has been raised and in case a Vote has been triggered previously no sooner than 15 working days since its conclusion.
    2. Only Contributors can vote, each contributor gets one vote.
    3. A Vote ends after 5 working days or when all Contributors have voted (whichever comes first).
    4. A Vote freezes the PR - no new commits or Reviews Requesting changes can be added to it while a vote is ongoing. If a commit is accidentally made during that period it should be reverted.
    5. The quorum for a Vote is 30% of all Contributors.
    6. The outcome of the vote is decided based on a simple majority.

Comments

  1. Researchers preparing academic manuscripts describing work that has been merged into this repository are strongly encouraged to invite all Maintainers as co-authors as a form of appreciation for their work.
  2. There are no restrictions on how the content of the PR is prepared. For example it is perfectly fine for a PR to consist of content developed by a group of experts over an extended period of time via in person meetings and online collaborations using a Google Document.
  3. To facilitate triage of incoming PR you can subscribe to notifications for new PRs proposing changes to specific files. To do this add your GitHub name next to the file you want to subscribe to in the CODEOWNERS. This way you will be ask to review each relevant PR. Please mind that lack of your review will not prevent the PR from being merged so if you think the PR needs your attention, please review it promptly or request more time via Request changes.
  4. Releases are triggered the same way as any other change - via a PR.
  5. PRs MUST be merged using the "Create a merge commit" option in GitHub (i.e., the "merge pull request" option). This is necessary for our automatic changelog generator to do its work reliably. See the GitHub help page for information on merge methods. See the changelog generator implementation in our circleci configuration file.