@hopeless yep that we are volunteer run is definitely an important factor to consider. Our model should take into account trust that people are willing and capable to follow through and do the work without being paid. That being said, this is hardly new territory, many projects including postmarketOS only got to where they are through the dedication and work done by volunteers, so it's not something I'm inherently concerned about.

Of course introducing complicated processes and overhead in order to be able to get involved and do the work is something that can push people away, and definitely something we want to be conscious of.

We already have motivated people and project-wide goals that we all work towards. Changing the structure doesn't mean broadening the scope or expecting to be able to get more done or move faster, rather it's a reaction to the growth of the project up to this point and dealing with the bottlenecks and power dynamics we have today that make it harder to scale up and increasingly drift from our mission statement.

Specifically: the core contributors today have ultimate power over the project, they are unelected, have no term limit, and can only be removed by unanimous vote from rest of the core contributors. This model makes sense for a small project with a dedicated team but the decision making process can't really be scaled beyond ~7 or so people without significant delay.

We also may not properly represent our community, and as we hope to expand postmarketOS and build a true competitor to Android and iOS we need to ensure that our community are empowered to keep the project aligned with its core goals.

Sorry for the ramble, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic so it's useful to get an outside perspective and have to justify them.

In case you're unfamiliar, our current governance structure is documented here https://docs.postmarketos.org/policies-and-processes/governance/groups-and-teams.html

@McNeely @cas

Yes, this is very much in my wheelhouse. Thanks also to @brainwane for the recommendation.

I've worked with several FOSS projects on similar transitions. I've also got some talks on the topic and some written resources (all free & open) and am happy to do a call.

https://relational-tech.com/services/governance_transitions.html

@mhoye Thank you!

@cas This is the kind of thing that @kfogel and @jamesvasile at https://opentechstrategies.com/ and @shauna at https://governingopen.com/get-help.html are very experienced at! I also have some expertise in this area but Shauna, James, and Karl have a *lot*.

@computersandblues we got a lot of useful comments here and need to take the next step but a boost would be fine ^^

we will absolutely publish many more details once we have a more solid idea of what we actually wanna do