Governance

Alpine Re-Organization

It has been suggested to keep a publicly available document for the re-organization efforts. This document, being on a public wiki, can serve this purpose.

Old Interim Policy

This is a direct dump of the old Interim Policy. They are pasted mostly verbatim, with some light formatting for wiki-compatibility added.

Non-technical member status

Hello,

As is already known, the core team holds final responsibility for all decisions made on behalf of the project. This includes defining what a Developer actually is. The core team has not at this time delegated that responsibility. Therefore, this email serves to document a modification to what is meant by Developer status, as well as creating a track for non-technical contributors to earn Developer status (as a non-technical member).

Member status

A Member is any participant in the project who has been granted full rights to the project. These rights include:

• the ability to nominate others for membership rights in the project
• the ability to nominate others for expulsion from the project (as a last resort)
• the ability to bring proposals up for a vote by the whole project
• the ability to vote on proposals
• an alpinelinux.org email account

A contributor may become a Member by either a technical track in which case they become a Developer or Sysadmin, or a non-technical track in which case they are just a Member.

A Maintainer is not a Member of the project unless they gain Developer status or are separately nominated under the non-technical Member procedure.

Developer status

Developer status remains largely unchanged, except that the rights exclusive to Developers and Sysadmins now belong to any Member. In other words, a Developer is now a Member who has full push rights and nothing else.

Sysadmin status

Sysadmin status remains largely unchanged, except that they are now just a Member who has special access to Alpine systems.

Non-technical contributor track

A non-technical contributor may be nominated for Member status by any other Member. As part of their nomination, they should highlight notable contributions made by the nominee.

A nomination will have a period of a week, starting from the moment a core team member acknowledges the nomination. At this point, admission is decided using lazy consensus: if 2 or more core team members approve of the nomination and there are no objections, the nomination will be accepted. Otherwise the core team will discuss and come to a conclusion after the deadline is hit.

If the nomination is accepted, then the infrastructure team will be directed to create the account, collecting an SSH key and any other pertinent data they need to process the account creation request.

A non-technical Member may apply for Maintainer or Developer privileges later, but they will have to complete the full technical track before getting Developer privileges.

Procedure for the admission and explusion of project members

Hello,

As you may already know, the core team holds final responsibility for all decisions made on behalf of the project. This includes the admission of maintainers and developers. The core team has not at this time delegated the responsibility of admission or expulsion of maintainers, developers, sysadmins and other project members. Thusly, this email serves to document established procedure for all of these things.

Member status

A Member is any participant in the project who has been granted full rights to the project. These rights include:

• the ability to nominate others for membership rights in the project
• the ability to nominate others for expulsion from the project (as a

last resort)

• the ability to bring proposals up for a vote by the whole project
• the ability to vote on proposals
• an alpinelinux.org email account

A contributor may become a Member by either a technical track in which case they become a Developer or Sysadmin, or a non-technical track in which case they are just a Member.

A Maintainer is not a Member of the project unless they gain Developer status or are separately nominated under the non-technical Member procedure.

Admission of maintainers

Before becoming a full developer, a prospective contributor must go through a probationary period, where they have "maintainer" status.

A maintainer can push only to edge, and only to testing and community branches.

Maintainers are nominated by *any* developer who is working with the contributor, by sending the nomination to the core team, preferably via Matrix or the alpine-team mailing list. The only requirement is that the developer nominating the contributor must have previously sponsored pushes of GIT commits from the contributor.

A nomination will have a period of a week, starting from the moment a core team member acknowledges the nomination. At this point, admission is decided using lazy consensus: if 2 or more core team members approve of the nomination and there are no objections, the nomination will be accepted. Otherwise the core team will discuss and come to a conclusion after the deadline is hit.

If the nomination is accepted, then the infrastructure team will be directed to create the account, collecting an SSH key and any other pertinent data they need to process the account creation request. The core team will set a timeline for when the new maintainer may apply to become a full developer as part of this process.

Full developer privilege

Once a new maintainer's probation period ends, they may be nominated, either by themselves or by a supporter, to become a full developer.

A developer privilege nomination will have a period of a week, starting from the moment the core team acknowledges the nomination. At this point, granting full privileges will be decided using lazy consensus: if 4 or more core team members approve of the nomination and there are no objections, the nomination will be accepted. Otherwise the core team will discuss and come to a conclusion after the deadline is hit.

If the nomination is accepted, the infrastructure team will be directed to grant the account in question full developer status.

This also grants Member status.

Non-technical contributor track

A non-technical contributor may be nominated for Member status by any other Member. As part of their nomination, they should highlight notable contributions made by the nominee.

A nomination will have a period of a week, starting from the moment a core team member acknowledges the nomination. At this point, admission is decided using lazy consensus: if 2 or more core team members approve of the nomination and there are no objections, the nomination will be accepted. Otherwise the core team will discuss and come to a conclusion after the deadline is hit.

If the nomination is accepted, then the infrastructure team will be directed to create the account, collecting an SSH key and any other pertinent data they need to process the account creation request.

A non-technical Member may apply for Maintainer or Developer privileges later, but they will have to complete the full technical track before getting Developer privileges.

Expulsion of Members

Any existing Member can nominate another Member for expulsion. This should only be done in the most extreme case. As this is a drastic measure, we require sending the request by email to the Alpine core team.

We reserve the right to reject the nomination if we believe that it is unlikely to survive the expulsion process or is caused by animosity between two participants. In the latter case, the participants should resolve their problem according to the Code of Conduct.

(This is meant as an extreme last resort, any Developer who abuses this process may find their expulsion nominations are ignored by the core team.)

Once an expulsion request is received and acknowledged, the Member who requested the expulsion should have any supporters contact the core team. Supporters must have Member status and they must send their statement of support to the Alpine core team by email.

Once a proposal reaches quorum, the core team will assign a core team member to handle the remaining process. If the proposal does not reach quorum, the process ends. Quorum is defined by the core team at the time of the proposal based on the number of active Members.

At this point, the person handling the expulsion process will contact the nominee and explain the situation. The person is required to disclose the names and reasons of the people involved with the proposal. They then have two weeks to respond with a statement of their own, and are encouraged to gather their own statements of support and forward those to the core team as well. Statements of support must be originated from Members.

Once the two weeks is up, the nominee may decide if they wish for the matter to be handled publicly, privately or to resign. If the nominee wishes to handle it publicly, they can write to alpine-devel about the accusations. Otherwise the person handling the expulsion process will mention it privately to all Developers.

At this point, the person handling the expulsion process will call for a project-wide vote about the expulsion. If the expulsion has greater than 2/3rds majority, the nominee will be expelled. At that point, the core team will set a period of time for the expulsion, after which the nominee may re-apply to become a maintainer or be nominated for membership. If the vote fails, then the matter is dropped.