Pyodide Governance and Decision-making

The purpose of this document is to formalize the governance process used by the Pyodide project, to clarify how decisions are made and how the various members of our community interact. This document establishes a decision-making structure that takes into account feedback from all members of the community and strives to find consensus, while avoiding deadlocks.

Anyone with an interest in the project can join the community, contribute to the project design and participate in the decision making process. This document describes how to participate and earn merit in the Pyodide community.

Roles And Responsibilities

Contributors

Contributors are community members who contribute in concrete ways to the project. Anyone can become a contributor, and contributions can take many forms, for instance, answering user questions – not only code – as detailed in How to Contribute.

Community members team

The community members team is composed of community members who have permission on Github to label and close issues. Their work is crucial to improve the communication in the project.

After participating in Pyodide development with pull requests and reviews for a period of time, any contributor may become a member of the team. The process for adding team members is modeled on the CPython project. Any core developer is welcome to propose a Pyodide contributor to join the community members team. Other core developers are then consulted: while it is expected that most acceptances will be unanimous, a two-thirds majority is enough.

Core developers

Core developers are community members who have shown that they are dedicated to the continued development of the project through ongoing engagement with the community. They have shown they can be trusted to maintain Pyodide with care. Being a core developer allows contributors to more easily carry on with their project related activities by giving them direct access to the project’s repository and is represented as being a member of the core team on the Pyodide GitHub organization. Core developers are expected to review code contributions, can merge approved pull requests, can cast votes for and against merging a pull-request, and can make decisions about major changes to the API (all contributors are welcome to participate in the discussion).

New core developers can be nominated by any existing core developers. Once they have been nominated, there will be a vote by the current core developers. Voting on new core developers is one of the few activities that takes place on the project’s private communication channels. While it is expected that most votes will be unanimous, a two-thirds majority of the cast votes is enough. The vote needs to be open for at least one week.

Core developers that have not contributed to the project (commits or GitHub comments) in the past two years will be asked if they want to become emeritus core developers and recant their commit and voting rights until they become active again.

Decision Making Process

Decisions about the future of the project are made through discussion with all members of the community. All non-sensitive project management discussion takes place on the project contributors’ issue tracker and on Github discussion. Occasionally, sensitive discussion occurs on a private communication channels.

Pyodide uses a “consensus seeking” process for making decisions. The group tries to find a resolution that has no open objections among core developers. At any point during the discussion, any core-developer can call for a vote, which will conclude two weeks from the call for the vote. This is what we hereafter may refer to as “the decision making process”.

Decisions (in addition to adding core developers as above) are made according to the following rules:

  • Maintenance changes, include for instance improving the wording in the documentation, updating CI or dependencies. Core developers are expected to give “reasonable time” to others to give their opinion on the Pull Request in case they’re not confident that others would agree. If no further review on the Pull Request is received within this time, it can be merged. If a review is received, then the consensus rules from the following section apply.

  • Code changes in general, and especially those impacting user facing APIs, as well as more significant documentation changes, require review and approval by a core developer and no objections raised by any core developer (lazy consensus). This process happens on the pull-request page.

  • Changes to the governance model use the same decision process outlined above.