/collective

How the unified collective is governed

Primary LanguageJavaScript

Collective governance

The unified collective is a federated system of organizations, consisting in turn of projects, governed by the team members steering them.

This project is maintained by the unified collective core team and describes how the collective is governed.

This document describes the teams of the collective. Additional policies describe other aspects of governance in detail:

Table of contents

Teams

+-------------------------------------------------+
|                   COLLECTIVE                    |
|                core & moderation                |
|                                                 |
|                                                 |
|                  ORGANIZATIONS                  |
| +-------------+ +-------------+ +-------------+ |
| |   unified   | |   remark    | |   rehype    | |
| +-------------+ +-------------+ +-------------+ |
| +-------------+ +-------------+ +-------------+ |
| |    retext   | |    redot    | |     mdx     | |
| +-------------+ +-------------+ +-------------+ |
| +-------------+ +-------------+ +-------------+ |
| |  micromark  | |    vfile    | | syntax tree | |
| +-------------+ +-------------+ +-------------+ |
+-------------------------------------------------+

The collective is governed by teams. Teams are scoped to one organization or the collective, respectively governing the projects or organizations under them. The core and moderation teams are special.

Teams serve as leadership for their scope. They:

  • Set the direction: setting the values that are used when making decisions about tradeoffs, steering the scope toward specific directions, and leading the discussion for initiatives
  • Shepherd initiatives: making stakeholders (people who are strongly affected by decisions) aware of initiatives, teasing out design tradeoffs and alternatives, and helping build consensus
  • Accept or reject issues, pull requests, and RFCs: deciding on initiatives, whether small or substantial
  • Nominate team members: nominating individuals making significant and valuable contributions across to be part of the team

Teams should be made up of:

  • Area experts: people who have a lot of interest and expertise in the area covered by the team, but who may be far less engaged with other areas of the collective
  • Stakeholders: people who are strongly affected by decisions in the area of the team, but who may not be experts in the design or implementation of that area

How teams communicate internally and externally is left to each team to decide, but:

  • Discussion should take place as much as possible in public spaces, ideally on issues, pull requests, or GitHub discussions
  • Teams should actively seek out discussion and input from non-members

Organization teams

Organization teams are scoped to an organization and govern the projects under it.

They have the same responsibilities as all teams, and additionally:

  • Escalate initiatives affecting the collective to a collective team
  • Implement accepted collective-level initiatives
  • Define policy on what form changes should take: such as which can be a direct pull request or RFC, which need to be escalated, and which can be handled by the team itself

Organization teams additionally include:

  • Team lead: person responsible for ensuring initiatives are progressing at a reasonable rate

unified team

The unified team is an organization team responsible for @unifiedjs.

Members

Releasers
Mergers

Contributors

remark team

The remark team is an organization team responsible for @remarkjs.

Members

Releasers
Mergers

Contributors

rehype team

The rehype team is an organization team responsible for @rehypejs.

Members

Releasers
Mergers

Contributors

retext team

The retext team is an organization team responsible for @retextjs.

Members

Releasers
Mergers

Contributors

redot team

The redot team is an organization team responsible for @redotjs.

Members

Releasers
Mergers

None.

mdx team

The mdx team is an organization team responsible for @mdx-js.

Members

Releasers
Mergers

Contributors

micromark team

The micromark team is an organization team responsible for @micromark.

Members

Releasers
Mergers

Contributors

syntax tree team

The syntax tree team is an organization team responsible for @syntax-tree.

Members

Releasers
Mergers

vfile team

The vfile team is an organization team responsible for @vfile.

Members

Releasers
Mergers

Contributors

Collective teams

Collective teams are scoped to the whole collective and govern the organizations under it.

They have the same responsibilities as all teams, and additionally:

  • De-escalate initiatives to organization teams
  • Focus on overarching concerns: they are specifically designed to take a global view of the collective, to make sure the pieces are fitting together in a coherent way

Core team

The core team is a collective team responsible for governing all other teams. This team does not have a lead and, to limit conflicts of interest, should not include moderation team members.

They:

  • Set the direction and vision for the collective across organizations: setting the core values that are used when making decisions about tradeoffs, steering the collective toward specific directions, and leading the discussion for major initiatives
  • Spin up or shut down teams: creating teams around new (temporary) areas and dissolving teams when their area is complete
  • Accept or reject motions: deciding on initiatives involving people and destructive actions on projects
  • Follow playbooks: following certain steps to enact accepted motions

Members

Contributors

Moderation team

The moderation team is a collective team responsible for enforcing the code of conduct. This team does not have a lead and, to limit conflicts of interest, should not include core team members.

Members

Glossary

Collective

The collective is unified as a whole with the organizations under it and the projects under them.

Organization

An organization is a collection of projects around a shared area typically hosted in a GitHub organization.

Project

A project is a single repository on GitHub governed by a team.

Initiative

An initiative is a (proposed) change.

Code of conduct

We follow the Contributor Covenant code of conduct. Please read it, as you agree to abide by it by interacting with the collective spaces (includes any online or offline place such as email, GitHub, npm, or Twitter).

Acknowledgements

This project is inspired by the Rust governance proposal, the Node governance docs, the Node admin project, the Electron governance docs, and Django’s dissolving of core.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.