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# Jujutsu Governance

## Overview

Jujutsu is an open source project, led, maintained and designed for a worldwide community. Anyone who is interested can join, contribute, and participate in the decision-making process. This document is intended to help you understand how you can do that.

## Project roles

We greatly appreciate everyone's contributions, and Jujutsu has benefited greatly from people who shared a single idea, change, or a suggestion, without ever becoming a regular contributor. We also want everybody to feel welcome to share their suggestions for the project (as long as you follow the Community Guidelines).

There are two special roles for participants in the Jujutsu projects: Maintainers and Contributors.

The role of the Maintainer is formally defined. These are the people empowered to collectively make final decisions about most aspects of the project. They are expected to take community's input seriously and to aim for the benefit of the entire community.

The role of a Contributor is less formal. In situations where opinions become numerous or contentious, it is acceptable for the maintainers to assign more weight to the voices of the more established Contributors.

### Maintainers

Maintainers are the people who contribute, review, guide, and collectively make decisions about the direction and scope of the project (see: Decision Making). Maintainers are elected by a voting process.

A typical Maintainer is not only someone who has made "large" contributions, but someone who has shown they are continuously committed to the project and its community. Some expected responsibilities of maintainers include (but are not exclusively limited to):

- Displaying a high level of commitment to the project and its community, and being a role model for others.
- Writing patches — a lot of patches, especially "glue code" or "grunt work" or general "housekeeping"; fixing bugs, ensuring documentation is always high quality, consistent UX design, improving processes, making judgments on dependencies, handling security vulnerabilities, and so on and so forth.
- Reviewing code submitted by others — with an eye to maintainability, performance, code quality, and "style" (fitting in with the project).
- Participating in design discussions, especially with regards to architecture or long-term vision.
- Ensuring the community remains a warm and welcoming place, to new and veteran members alike.
- Practicing transparency in the project, communicating decisions and their rationale when appropriate.

This is not an exhaustive list, nor is it intended that every Maintainer does each and every one of these individual tasks to equal amounts. Rather this is only a guideline for what Maintainers are expected to conceptually do.

In short, Maintainers are the outwardly visible stewards of the project.

#### Current list of Maintainers

The current list of Maintainers:

- Austin Seipp (@thoughtpolice)
- Benjamin Tan (@bnjmnt4n)
- Ilya Grigoriev (@ilyagr)
- Martin von Zweigbergk (@martinvonz)
- Scott Taylor (@scott2000)
- Waleed Khan (@arxanas)
- Yuya Nishihara (@yuja)

### Contributors

We consider contributors to be active participants in the project and community who are not maintainers. These are people who might:

- Help users by answering questions
- Participating in lively and respectful discussions across various channels
- Submit high-quality bug reports, reproduce reported bugs, and verifying fixes
- Submit patches or pull requests
- Provide reviews and input on others' pull requests
- Help with testing and quality assurance
- Submit feedback about planned features, use cases, or bugs

We essentially define them as people who actively participate in the project. Examples of things that would not make you a contributor are:

- Submitting a single bug report and never returning
- Writing blog posts or other evangelism
- Using the software in production
- Forking the project and maintaining your own version
- Writing a third-party tool or add-on

While these are all generally quite valuable, we don't consider these ongoing contributions to the codebase or project itself, and on their own do not constitute "active participation".

## Processes

For the purposes of making decisions across the project, the following processes are defined.

### Decision-Making

The person proposing a decision to be made (i.e. technical, project direction, etc.) can offer a proposal, along with a 2-to-4 week deadline for discussion. During this time, Maintainers may participate with a vote of:

A) Support B) Reject C) Abstain

Each Maintainer gets one vote. The total number of "participating votes" is the number of Maintainer votes which are not Abstain. The proposal is accepted when more than half of the participating votes are Support.

In the event that a decision is reached before the proposed timeline, said proposal can move on and be accepted immediately. In the event no consensus is reached, a proposal may be re-submitted later on.

This document itself is subject to the Decision-Making process by the existing set of Maintainers.

### Adding and Removing Maintainers

An active Contributor may, at any given time, nominate themselves or another Contributor to become a Maintainer. This process is purely optional and no Contributor is expected to do so; however, self-nomination is encouraged for active participants. A vote and discussion by the existing Maintainers will be used to decide the outcome.

Note that Contributors should demonstrate a high standard of continuous participation to become a Maintainer; the upper limit on the number of Maintainers is practically bounded, and so rejection should be considered as a real possibility. As the scope of the project changes, this limit may increase, but it is fundamentally fluid. (If you are unsure, you are free to privately ask existing Maintainers before self-nominating if there is room.)

A Maintainer may, at any time, cede their responsibility and step down without a vote.

A Maintainer can be removed by other Maintainers, subject to a vote of at-least a 2/3rds majority from the existing Maintainer group (excluding the vote of the Maintainer in question). This can be due to lack of participation or conduct violations, among other things. Note that Maintainers are subject to a higher set of behavioral and communicative standards than average contributor or participant.

### Single-Company Influence

At most 1/3 of the maintainers may be paid for their contributions by a single company. This is to reduce the risk of a single company controlling the project's direction. If the 1/3 limit gets exceeded because an existing maintainer gets hired by the same company as some other existing maintainer(s), then the maintainers will have to decide how to resolve the situation. The maintainer in question gets to vote, as long as this doesn't mean the company in question has half the votes (usually meaning there are at least 5 maintainers total).