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Exploring technical governance models: responsibilities/authority, decision making process, communication mechanisms/frequency (TECH)

Exploring technical governance models: responsibilities/authority, decision making process, communication mechanisms/frequency (TECH)

Oct 02, 2015

Description: What is the domain of the technical committee, and what decisions are they empowered to make? What technical governance models are working for other open source communities? What type of model may we want to pursue? Note: governance model will not be formalized at this meeting. 

Leads: Darius

Rapporteur/Notetaker: Rich

Recording:  Morning 3, session 1.mp3

Notes from Session:

Technical WG Discussion

Karl:  can we make decision on tech wg today?

Darius:  we can start with set of members, but new member should be able to join easily, but we need some criteria.

 

What is the initial composition?

What is the scope of activities?

Frequency of Communications?

Scope for Tech WG

  • Arbiter for disagreements on pull request reviews, etc.
    • How are decisions made?  What if there's a tie? :)
  • Forum for technical discussions
  • Final architecture decisions
    • Decisions made via democratic vote
  • Tech review of new projects; act as a "check" for the product management function
  • Regular architectural review for roadmap and tech debt
  • Decide on tech/coding standards, which determines what code and features can make it into the master branch
  • Owners on the relevant OpenLMIs github repositories
  • Tool selection
  • Responsive to community input
  • Reviews and approves membership (in collaboration with governance group)

 

Discussed again the concept of "chief" architect and product owner roles

 

(OpenMRS has a "benevolent dictator" model.  In Darius' memory, that person  never had to fully exercise that authority)

Discussed other open source projects that forked, often due to disputes within technical committee, or bad oversight.

 

Tech WG Membership criteria:

  • Senior level dev/architect
  • OpenLMIS Experience level:  favor longer experience with OpenLMIS, and expect ongoing engagement with the work
    • We can expect some gap between projects for an organization

Membership nominations:

  • Elias - JSI
  • Josh - VillageReach
  • Jeff - ThoughtWorks
  • CHAI - hold for now

Frequency of communications

  • Bi-weekly meetings proposed, as there are a lot of short-term tasks involved


Morning 3, session 1.mp3

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