Governance Model

Abstract

The purpose of this document is to formalize the governance process used by the bioio project, to clarify how decisions are made and how the various elements of our community interact.

This is a consensus-based community project. Anyone with an interest in the project can join the community, contribute to the project design, and participate in the decision making process. This document describes how that participation takes place, how to find consensus, and how deadlocks are resolved.

Roles And Responsibilities

The Community

The bioio community consists of anyone using or working with the project in any way.

Contributors

A community member can become a contributor by interacting directly with the project in concrete ways, such as:

among other possibilities. Any community member can become a contributor, and all are encouraged to do so. By contributing to the project, community members can directly help to shape its future.

Contributors are encouraged to read the contributing guide.

Core developers

Core developers are community members that have demonstrated continued commitment to the project through ongoing contributions. They have shown they can be trusted to maintain bioio with care. Becoming a core developer allows contributors to merge approved pull requests, cast votes for and against merging a pull-request, and be involved in deciding major changes to the API, and thereby more easily carry on with their project related activities. Core developers appear as team members on our @bioio-devs/trusted-developers GitHub team. Core developers are asked to review code contributions. New core developers can be nominated by any existing core developer.

Steering Council

The Steering Council (SC) members are core developers who have additional responsibilities to ensure the smooth running of the project. SC members are expected to participate in strategic planning, approve changes to the governance model. The purpose of the SC is to ensure smooth progress from the big picture perspective. Changes that impact the full project require analysis informed by long experience with both the project and the larger ecosystem. When the core developer community (including the SC members) fails to reach such a consensus in a reasonable time-frame, the SC is the entity that resolves the issue.

The steering council is currently fixed to only include members directly from Allen Institute for Cell Science. This may be changed in the future, but this results in the steering council currently consisting of:

New members are added by nomination by a core developer. Nominees should have demonstrated long-term, continued commitment to the project and its mission and values.

Decision Making Process

Decisions about the future of the project are made through discussion with all members of the community. All non-sensitive project management discussion takes place on the issue tracker. Occasionally, sensitive discussion may occur through a private core developer channel.

Decisions should be made in accordance with the mission and values of the bioio project.

bioio uses a “consensus seeking” process for making decisions. The group tries to find a resolution that has no open objections among core developers. Core developers are expected to distinguish between fundamental objections to a proposal and minor perceived flaws that they can live with, and not hold up the decision-making process for the latter.