The NiPreps Community's Governance Documents are derived from the Minimum Viable Governance (MVG) project, adapted following the discussion within the NiPreps Governance task-force, and finally approved by the community members on April 26, 2023.
The MVG foundation provides an overall three-tier organizational governance structure for a set of free and open source components of the NiPreps Framework. At the top level (called an "organization" on GitHub; github.com/nipreps), there is a technical steering committee to make decisions about the overall direction and coordination between all the organization's projects. Underneath that top level are the individual projects (e.g., nipreps/fmriprep), with lightweight, consensus-based governance. The third tier are "sibling organizations" (e.g., TemplateFlow, which have the structure of GitHub "organizations" but the governance of individual projects (i.e., lightweight, consensus-based).
The Governance Documents are organized in three folders. The first, org-docs/, provides top-level organizational governance and polices for a technical steering committee (NiPreps steering committee, NSC). The core of this top-level governance is contained in the orgs-docs/CHARTER.md file.
The second folder, project-docs/, provides a template for individual project governance, subject to the polices and oversight of the larger organization.
The third folder, sibling-docs/, provides a minimal template for the governance of sibling organizations, subject to the policies and oversight of the NiPreps organization.