node/GOVERNANCE.md

# Node.js Project Governance

<!-- TOC -->

* [Triagers](#triagers)
* [Collaborators](#collaborators)
  * [Collaborator activities](#collaborator-activities)
* [Technical steering committee](#technical-steering-committee)
  * [TSC meetings](#tsc-meetings)
* [Collaborator nominations](#collaborator-nominations)
  * [Who can nominate Collaborators?](#who-can-nominate-collaborators)
  * [Ideal Nominees](#ideal-nominees)
  * [Nominating a new Collaborator](#nominating-a-new-collaborator)
  * [Onboarding](#onboarding)
* [Consensus seeking process](#consensus-seeking-process)

<!-- /TOC -->

## Triagers

Triagers assess newly-opened issues in the [nodejs/node][] and [nodejs/help][]
repositories. The GitHub team for Node.js triagers is @nodejs/issue-triage.
Triagers are given the "Triage" GitHub role and have:

* Ability to label issues and pull requests
* Ability to comment, close, and reopen issues and pull requests

See:

* [List of triagers](./README.md#triagers)
* [A guide for triagers](./doc/contributing/issues.md#triaging-a-bug-report)

## Collaborators

Node.js core collaborators maintain the [nodejs/node][] GitHub repository.
The GitHub team for Node.js core collaborators is @nodejs/collaborators.
Collaborators have:

* Commit access to the [nodejs/node][] repository
* Access to the Node.js continuous integration (CI) jobs

Both collaborators and non-collaborators may propose changes to the Node.js
source code. The mechanism to propose such a change is a GitHub pull request.
Collaborators review and merge (_land_) pull requests.

Two collaborators must approve a pull request before the pull request can land.
(One collaborator approval is enough if the pull request has been open for more
than 7 days.) Approving a pull request indicates that the collaborator accepts
responsibility for the change. Approval must be from collaborators who are not
authors of the change.

If a collaborator opposes a proposed change, then the change cannot land. The
exception is if the TSC votes to approve the change despite the opposition.
Usually, involving the TSC is unnecessary. Often, discussions or further changes
result in collaborators removing their opposition.

See:

* [List of collaborators](./README.md#current-project-team-members)
* [A guide for collaborators](./doc/contributing/collaborator-guide.md)

### Collaborator activities

* Helping users and novice contributors
* Contributing code and documentation changes that improve the project
* Reviewing and commenting on issues and pull requests
* Participation in working groups
* Merging pull requests

The TSC can remove inactive collaborators or provide them with _emeritus_
status. Emeriti may request that the TSC restore them to active status.

A collaborator is automatically made emeritus (and removed from active
collaborator status) if it has been more than 12 months since the collaborator
has authored or approved a commit that has landed.

## Technical Steering Committee

A subset of the collaborators forms the Technical Steering Committee (TSC).
The TSC has final authority over this project, including:

* Technical direction
* Project governance and process (including this policy)
* Contribution policy
* GitHub repository hosting
* Conduct guidelines
* Maintaining the list of collaborators

The current list of TSC members is in
[the project README](./README.md#current-project-team-members).

The [TSC Charter][] governs the operations of the TSC. All changes to the
Charter need approval by the OpenJS Foundation Cross-Project Council (CPC).

### TSC meetings

The TSC meets in a video conference call. Each year, the TSC elects a chair to
run the meetings. The TSC streams its meetings for public viewing on YouTube.

TSC meetings may consist of a public portion and a private portion. The private
portion is used to discuss sensitive topics, such as personnel issues,
security vulnerabilities, or other confidential matters. Private discussions
should be avoided as much as possible, and the TSC should strive to keep
discussions in the public portion of the meeting, but there are times when
private discussions are necessary.

The TSC agenda includes issues that are at an impasse. The intention of the
agenda is not to review or approve all patches. Collaborators review and approve
patches on GitHub. The preference is to minimize the need for TSC meetings to
make decisions that can otherwise be made by collaborators on GitHub.

Any community member can create a GitHub issue asking that the TSC review
something. If consensus-seeking fails for an issue, a collaborator may apply the
`tsc-agenda` label. That will add it to the TSC meeting agenda.

Before each TSC meeting, the meeting chair will share the agenda with members of
the TSC. TSC members can also add items to the agenda at the beginning of each
meeting. The meeting chair and the TSC cannot veto or remove items.

The TSC may invite people to take part in a non-voting capacity in either the
public or private portions of the meeting.

During the public portion of the meeting, the TSC chair ensures that someone
takes minutes that include a summary of the discussion and any
decisions made. After the meeting, the TSC chair ensures that someone opens a
public pull request with the minutes from the public portion of the meeting.

The public portion of the TSC meeting is expected to be recorded and made
available for live streaming during the meeting or download by anyone after.
This expectation is to be announced to all participants at the start of the
each meeting before the recording is started. Continued participation in the
public portion of the meeting after this announcement is interpreted as consent to the
recording.

For the private portion of the meeting, the TSC chair ensures that someone
produces a summary of the discussions, gets it reviewed by the attendees,
and shares it to all the TSC members once approved by the attendees via a
private discussion channel such as the TSC private mailing list. The summary
may be made public if there is consensus within the TSC and the non-TSC
attendees to make it public.

Recording the private portion of a meeting or maintaining or publishing a
detailed transcript is only permitted when all participants present during the
private portion of the meeting explicitly agree to the recording and/or
transcript, in order to comply to privacy regulations.

All discussions made during meetings are considered provisional, receiving no
objections from folks at the TSC meeting to take an action is not equivalent to
the TSC endorsing that action.

If a quorum of TSC voting members is present, it is possible to call for an
explicit vote, and take the vote immediately if there are no objections. The
decision is considered confirmed once the rest of the TSC voting members have
been informed and no objection for taking that vote has been raised in 48 hours.
To clarify, TSC voting members can object to the vote taking place during the
meeting, but not to the vote itself.

For discussions outside of meetings, the TSC uses
[the TSC issue tracker](https://github.com/nodejs/TSC/issues) for public
issues, and the private TSC email list for private matters. The process for
public issues in the issue tracker is:

* A TSC member opens an issue explaining the proposal/issue and @-mentions
  @nodejs/tsc.
* The proposal passes if, after 72 hours, there are two or more TSC voting
  member approvals and no TSC voting member opposition.
* If there is an extended impasse, a TSC member may ask for the issue to be
  added to the TSC agenda, or make a motion for a vote.

## Collaborator nominations

### Who can nominate Collaborators?

Existing Collaborators can nominate someone to become a Collaborator.

### Ideal Nominees

Nominees should have significant and valuable contributions across the Node.js
organization.

Contributions can be:

* Opening pull requests.
* Comments and reviews.
* Opening new issues.
* Participation in other projects, teams, and working groups of the Node.js
  organization.

Collaborators should be people volunteering to do unglamorous work because it's
the right thing to do, they find the work itself satisfying, and they care about
Node.js and its users. People should get collaborator status because they're
doing work and are likely to continue doing work where having the abilities that
come with collaborator status are helpful (abilities like starting CI jobs,
reviewing and approving PRs, etc.). That will usually--but, very importantly, not
always--be work involving committing to the `nodejs/node` repository. For an example
of an exception, someone working primarily on the website might benefit from being
able to start Jenkins CI jobs to test changes to documentation tooling. That,
along with signals indicating commitment to Node.js, personal integrity, etc.,
should be enough for a successful nomination.

It is important to understand that potential collaborators may have vastly
different areas and levels of expertise, interest, and skill. The Node.js
project is large and complex, and it is not expected that every collaborator
will have the same level of expertise in every area of the project. The
complexity or "sophistication" of an individual’s contributions, or even their
relative engineering "skill" level, are not primary factors in determining
whether they should be a collaborator. The primary factors do include the quality
of their contributions (do the contributions make sense, do they add value, do
they follow documented guidelines, are they authentic and well-intentioned,
etc.), their commitment to the project, can their judgement be trusted, and do
they have the ability to work well with others.

#### The Authenticity of Contributors

The Node.js project does not require that contributors use their legal names or
provide any personal information verifying their identity.

It is not uncommon for malicious actors to attempt to gain commit access to
open-source projects in order to inject malicious code or for other nefarious
purposes. The Node.js project has a number of mechanisms in place to prevent
this, but it is important to be vigilant. If you have concerns about the
authenticity of a contributor, please raise them with the TSC. Anyone nominating
a new collaborator should take reasonable steps to verify that the contributions
of the nominee are authentic and made in good faith. This is not always easy,
but it is important.

### Nominating a new Collaborator

To nominate a new Collaborator:

1. **Optional but strongly recommended**: open a
   [discussion in the nodejs/collaborators][] repository. Provide a summary of
   the nominee's contributions (see below for an example).
2. **Optional but strongly recommended**: After sufficient wait time (e.g. 72
   hours), if the nomination proposal has received some support and no explicit
   block, and any questions/concerns have been addressed, add a comment in the
   private discussion stating you're planning on opening a public issue, e.g.
   "I see a number of approvals and no block, I'll be opening a public
   nomination issue if I don't hear any objections in the next 72 hours".
3. **Optional but strongly recommended**: Privately contact the nominee to make
   sure they're comfortable with the nomination.
4. Open an issue in the [nodejs/node][] repository. Provide a summary of
   the nominee's contributions (see below for an example). Mention
   @nodejs/collaborators in the issue to notify other collaborators about
   the nomination.

The _Optional but strongly recommended_ steps are optional in the sense that
skipping them would not invalidate the nomination, but it could put the nominee
in a very awkward situation if a nomination they didn't ask for pops out of
nowhere only to be rejected. Do not skip those steps unless you're absolutely
certain the nominee is fine with the public scrutiny.

Example of list of contributions:

* Commits in the [nodejs/node][] repository.
  * Use the link `https://github.com/nodejs/node/commits?author=GITHUB_ID`
* Pull requests and issues opened in the [nodejs/node][] repository.
  * Use the link `https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues?q=author:GITHUB_ID`
* Comments on pull requests and issues in the [nodejs/node][] repository
  * Use the link `https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues?q=commenter:GITHUB_ID`
* Reviews on pull requests in the [nodejs/node][] repository
  * Use the link `https://github.com/nodejs/node/pulls?q=reviewed-by:GITHUB_ID`
* Help provided to end-users and novice contributors
* Pull requests and issues opened throughout the Node.js organization
  * Use the link  `https://github.com/search?q=author:GITHUB_ID+org:nodejs`
* Comments on pull requests and issues throughout the Node.js organization
  * Use the link `https://github.com/search?q=commenter:GITHUB_ID+org:nodejs`
* Participation in other projects, teams, and working groups of the Node.js
  organization
* Other participation in the wider Node.js community

The nomination passes if no collaborators oppose it (as described in the
following section) after one week. In the case of an objection, the TSC is
responsible for working with the individuals involved and finding a resolution.
The TSC may, following typical TSC consensus seeking processes, choose to
advance a nomination that has otherwise failed to reach a natural consensus or
clear path forward even if there are outstanding objections. The TSC may also
choose to prevent a nomination from advancing if the TSC determines that any
objections have not been adequately addressed.

#### How to review a collaborator nomination

A collaborator nomination can be reviewed in the same way one would review a PR
adding a feature:

* If you see the nomination as something positive to the project, say so!
* If you are neutral, or feel you don't know enough to have an informed opinion,
  it's certainly OK to not interact with the nomination.
* If you think the nomination was made too soon, or can be detrimental to the
  project, share your concerns. See the section "How to oppose a collaborator
  nomination" below.

Our goal is to keep gate-keeping at a minimal, but it cannot be zero since being
a collaborator requires trust (collaborators can start CI jobs, use their veto,
push commits, etc.), so what's the minimal amount is subjective, and there will
be cases where collaborators disagree on whether a nomination should move
forward.

Refrain from discussing or debating aspects of the nomination process
itself directly within a nomination private discussion or public issue.
Such discussions can derail and frustrate the nomination causing unnecessary
friction. Move such discussions to a separate issue or discussion thread.

##### How to oppose a collaborator nomination

An important rule of thumb is that the nomination process is intended to be
biased strongly towards implicit approval of the nomination. This means
discussion and review around the proposal should be more geared towards "I have
reasons to say no..." as opposed to "Give me reasons to say yes...".

Given that there is no "Request for changes" feature in discussions and issues,
try to be explicit when your comment is expressing a blocking concern.
Similarly, once the blocking concern has been addressed, explicitly say so.

Explicit opposition would typically be signaled as some form of clear
and unambiguous comment like, "I don't believe this nomination should pass".
Asking clarifying questions or expressing general concerns is not the same as
explicit opposition; however, a best effort should be made to answer such
questions or addressing those concerns before advancing the nomination.

Opposition does not need to be public. Ideally, the comment showing opposition,
and any discussion thereof, should be done in the private discussion _before_
the public issue is opened. Opposition _should_ be paired with clear suggestions
for positive, concrete, and unambiguous next steps that the nominee can take to
overcome the objection and allow it to move forward. While such suggestions are
technically optional, they are _strongly encouraged_ to prevent the nomination
from stalling indefinitely or objections from being overridden by the TSC.

Remember that all private discussions about a nomination will be visible to
the nominee once they are onboarded.

### Onboarding

After the nomination passes, a TSC member onboards the new collaborator. See
[the onboarding guide](./onboarding.md) for details of the onboarding
process.

## Consensus seeking process

The TSC follows a [Consensus Seeking][] decision-making model per the
[TSC Charter][].

[Consensus Seeking]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus-seeking_decision-making
[TSC Charter]: https://github.com/nodejs/TSC/blob/HEAD/TSC-Charter.md
[discussion in the nodejs/collaborators]: https://github.com/nodejs/collaborators/discussions/categories/collaborator-nominations
[nodejs/help]: https://github.com/nodejs/help
[nodejs/node]: https://github.com/nodejs/node