Governance

This document relays guiding principles, practices, policies, code of conduct, organization, and processes of the eLxr open source project. The eLxr open source project does not plan to handle money or become a non-profit organization. Therefore, no legal entity or bylaws are required. While a complete governance is not required at a project’s launch, it’s mission and key governance foundations should be communicated (expectations for behavior, contributor process, decision-making processes, initial key roles).

Mission

Coordinate, prioritize, and allocate resources to work within the Debian community to harden and add functionality to a curated collection of Debian packages to improve Debian distributions for commercial environment use cases selected by eLxr.

Guiding Principles

• Community Forges the Path
  The best results come from people collaborating and having fun. Everyone has a voice and can easily contribute to the eLxr project.
• Open Source Integrity
  Maintain a commitment to the open source community by ensuring transparency, community engagement, and upstream contributions.
• Prioritized Security
  Never compromise on security measures, ensuring the system is resilient against modern threats in diverse enterprise applications.
• Enhanced Usability
  Value-added tools targeted to improve developer experience, enhance productivity, and enable users to focus on their use cases.
• Minimal and Extensible Footprint
  Leightweight base image backed by the full Debian package ecosystem, enabling users to easily customize and deploy system images with a minimal footprint.
• Optimized Performance
  Designed for the most demanding workloads, pushing the hardware limits in high-performance, mission-critical applications.
• Predictable Execution
  Dependable timing, reliable processing, and enhanced determinism for system-critical tasks.

Governance Framework

A governance framework helps to center the organization’s approach around common themes, including who has a voice, who makes decisions and who has accountability. The eLxr open source project is focused on curating Debian packages for commercial targets. It’s governance should both align with Debian’s governance and establish how eLxr functions as a project. Debian is more meritocratic than liberal contribution. Adopting Debian’s governance completely is not necessary and may not be the best fit for eLxr’s bimodal needs. However, modeling after Debian to align with Debian values and process behaviors is suggested, since development work will be done upstream from and within Debian itself. A point from the liberal contribution model to strongly consider is viewing meritocratic influence based upon recent contributions rather than historic. Too often, eternal influence is garnered from an initial contribution or code dump that can never be matched.

Organization

Founding Members

The founding eLxr members are those who have membership at the time of project formation. Their role is to instantiate the initial project leadership which is to serve for two years. Any initial leadership role filled by a Founding Member company is limited to the initial term. They may seek re-appointment after a full election cycle abstention.

During the first year of initial leadership tenure, Founding Members will organize and serve as a Board of Directors to provide guidance and assist additional project formation business. Upon the project’s first anniversary, the Founding Members will have no formal organizational role.

Project Leader

The Project Leader is accountable for assuring eLxr can execute its mission. They preside over the Leadership Team comprised by the Project Leader and the Leadership Committee. They are the face and voice of the project; they are the project’s sole, official spokesperson.

There are no formal eligibility requirements.

Typical Task List

• Speak with Press
• Present at conferences
• Respond to formal project inquiries
• Recruit needed contributors
• Remediate any code of conduct issues
• Meet with DPL
• Attend Leadership Committee functions
• Conduct regular project “all-hands” and member meetings

Leadership Committee

Constituency is technical (3-4) and use case (2-4) SMEs. An additional position on the committee from the Debian community (eLxr membership does not qualify) shall exist.

Role is to identify, prioritize, and maintain target commercial use cases and set a technical strategy that identifies and readies Debian to support them and commission any necessary eLxr sub-project or sub-teams needed.

There are no formal eligibility requirements.

Typical Task List

• Create and maintain eLxr use case targets and priorities
• Articulate use case requirements free of customer or product specificity
• Select target or candidate Debian packages needed for each use case
• Create “map” of contributions eLxr must make to Debian and upstream Debian
• Recruit community members
• Instantiate eLxr sub-groups as needed

Community Contributors

Community Contributors are not elected, appointed, or accredited. They contribute content and time toward the execution of the eLxr technical strategy to either Debian or eLxr, itself.

There are no formal eligibility requirements. However, community contributors would ideally be already recognized and active within the Debian community. For additional information on the eLxr contributor process, see the eLxr Project Contributor Guide.

Typical Task List

• Implement eLxr “map”ped Debian contributions of code, documentation, etc.

How Individuals or Bodies are Selected for Roles

Project Leader
Is elected annually by eLxr community members that have made contribution to the project since previous election.

Leadership Committee
Technical SME positions are elected by eLxr members that have made code or documentation contributions on eLxr’s behalf of eLxr to either eLxr or Debian. A technical SME election is conducted every year for ½ of the maximum seats.

Use Case SME positions are determined by the full leadership team. Nominations are voted on by the incumbent Leadership Committee to be either approved or rejected by a newly elected Project Leader. A use case SME election is conducted every year for ½ of the maximum seats.

If A Debian community representative seat is vacant, any eLxr community member can nominate anyone from the Debian community who is a DM, member of the TSC, or the DPL. They shall be the representative until either the representative or the Leadership Team decides to end the term.

Formal Decision Processes

Project Leader
In all cases, the Project Leader ideally seeks support from the Leadership Committee and the contributor community. They have full authority to make decisions on:

• Operations
• Member conduct (eLxr internal)
• eLxr behavior
• Any matter jeopardizing the project

Leadership Committee
Use Case selection and capability requirement decisions require a majority vote of sitting use case representatives and a plurality of technical representatives. If a Debian representative seat is filled, they vote as a technical representative.

Technical approach, strategy, and Debian content decisions require a majority vote of sitting technical representatives and a plurality of use case representatives. If a Debian representative seat is filled, they vote as a technical representative.

Community Contributor (not just “developers”)
Community Contributor decisions are to be made in consort with Debian using appropriate Debian governance.

                                                                
^{1 A Meritocracy is where active project contributors participate in decision making. Decisions are usually made based on pure voting consensus. Contributions can only be made by individuals representing themselves, not by a company.
2 Liberal Contribution is where people who do the most work are recognized as most influential based on current work and not historic contributions. Major project decisions are made based on a consensus-seeking process rather than pure vote and strive to include as many community perspectives as possible.}