Brooklyn Project Governance

Brooklyn's management is modelled on the Apache approach whereby people guilty of consistent, high-quality reliable contributions are invited to become committers.

Most decisions about the project -- agreeing approaches, accepting contributions, and resolving problems -- are generally by consensus on the brooklyn-dev@ mailing list, in which all mailing list members may participate. However, only committers are permitted to make changes to the code or to vote where there are issues requiring a vote (such as disagreements or signficant actions, as described below).

Certain decisions concerning specific governance and oversight matters are reserved to the Project Management Committee (PMC). This committee consists of selected committers who have agreed to take on additional responsibilities, such as ensuring regulatory compliance and extra consideration of the protection of project users. Selected actions require a PMC vote (described below).

Project Commits and Votes

  • All commits and pull requests should be approved by at least one committer
  • Any controversial commit (e.g. if someone -1's it) requires a committer vote
  • A vote is required for official alpha or release candidate builds
  • Votes can also be called for other code actions, and are encouraged for significant changes such as promotion from sandbox (in large part to let people know)

The voting rules are as follows:

  • Votes are called by email to brooklyn-dev@googlegroups.com
  • Votes should come by email
  • Comments are welcome from all members, and committers should take these into consideration
  • A simple majority of those committers who respond within 24h is required
  • If a simple majority of all committers is reached sooner than 24h the action is approved

PMC Vote

The following activities require a PMC vote, where again all committers and list members may comment, and PMC members should take these into consideration, but only PMC members' votes are binding:

  • official releases (of release candidate builds)
  • changes to committer ship, including inviting new committers
  • changes to PMC membership
  • changes to the governance policy

The process of the PMC vote is otherwise identical to normal project/committer votes.