Decision-making

Decisions are either consultative or consensus-based, depending on type. This is a temporary solution to bootstrap the community. As we grow, this will evolve into a different governance structure, and this document will be updated when that happens.

Once the feature is available, decisions will be made through plaits itself.

We assume that everyone's work follows the Principles documented here in the library (Community, Design or otherwise).

We distinguish between a few kinds of decisions:

Unilateral (individuals can decide):

Decisions that have clear answer and minimal impact on the community:

• Bug fixes that don't change behaviour,
• Code refactors or performance improvements that don't affect UX or APIs.

Consultative (one person can decide after consulting others):

Decisions that benefit from advice from others and have impact on subset of the community:

• Feature prioritization,
• UX changes,
• Documentation improvements.

Consensus required:

Important decisions that affect the community or software project as a whole:

• Pricing model changes,
• Governance model changes,
• What data we collect (even encrypted/metadata),
• Who gets access to infrastructure,
• Partnerships or funding that might create conflicts.

Note: Although this is not needed right now, we'll later elaborate on what kind of consensus (rough vs. full consensus)

User input required:

Lastly any decision that impacts the user of the app should involve the user:

• Major UX changes,
• Features that change how organizations use the tool,
• Breaking changes to existing workflows.