Draft of new associated-project-howto for review

[Henrik Ingo]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 6:05 PM, Ian Jackson
<ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>> 3) Liaison
> ...
>> This model has many advantages over a single self appointed person
>> having all control, but doesn't really add any overhead in normal
>> circumstances. I'd recommend to template this format and suggest it as
>> an alternative (or the primary?) model of appointing a liaison.
>
> I think a reasonable alternative model is:
>
>  * Alice Adams (and her successors) are currently recognised by SPI as
>   the authoritative decisionmakers for Gnomovision.
>
>  * In the event of any dispute within the Gnomovision project, SPI
>   will aim to
>     (a) abide by the consensus of the Gnomovision community
>     (b) act in the best interests of the Gnomovision project
>       [choose one]
>   provided always that SPI will honour the principles in SPI's
>   Framework for Associated Projects.  If such decision is necessary,
>   it will be made, after public consultation, by the SPI Board.
>   The SPI Board's decision, as to who is recognised by SPI as the
>   authoritative decisionmaker for Gnomovision, will be final.
>
> Ie I think the SPI Board should be willing to act as a governance
> appeal body of last resort, if that's what the project wants.  That
> will avoid the project having to set up some kind of self-perpetuating
> council or committee whose only purpose is to deal with SPI.
>
> Obviously not every project will want this.

An "appeal body of last resort" may not be a bad idea, or maybe it is,
but in any case this is not at all the same as I proposed. I think the
above is much fluffier and leaves some uncertainty:

Imagine a project with three active/core developers. One is the
self-appointed liaision. The liaison dies, and the remaining two core
developers start a bitter fight. How will the SPI board even be able
to know what is in the best interest of the project? It's to some
degree a subjective decision. It could even be a political decision
such as GPL vs BSD and whatever other dividing lines those two
fighting developers might represent...

For reference, the Drizzle Liaison process is here:
http://spi-inc.org/meetings/minutes/2011/2011-08-10/
... removing the names it could be easily templated as is.

henrik

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