Announcement: formation of a Jujutsu governance structure

[thoughtpolice]

This is a repost of an announcement on Discord this past week. Sorry for not posting it here sooner! https://discord.com/channels/968932220549103686/1245847953726378124/1249783626766225469

---

Hey folks, I wanted to pop by and say that a few of us got together for the first time last month for an exciting little meetup: we're forming a group to try and design a governance structure for Jujutsu! Things have picked up a lot in the past year and we're getting more contributions and users than ever[1], which is exciting. If we’re going to keep growing organically like this, we want to make sure we have a healthy, sustainable process for the project, and for all of us.

There are no immediate changes to the project policies. Really, it just means a few of us will meet every week for a little while to figure out possible structures and policies. It's not too glamorous. We did feel it was right to bring this up now, as a matter of prudence and transparency, and so that the establishment of future policies doesn't come as a surprise to the community. We'll also be taking some feedback from y’all later — in case you have any ideas you want us to think about.

When Martin and Emily first had the idea to form this group, Martin nominated us as the first set of people for a simple reason: because we want to see the project succeed. We're not conspiring, we're here with you in chat and on GitHub, you've seen us and you can talk to us. We mainly want to lay some groundwork for things like:

• What actual responsibility even exists? Actually deciding what structures exist has to come from the top-down. For example, establishing a group for technical decisions, or technical leadership.
• What should be the process for people rotating in and out of leadership roles? Or any role? Our current thought is that we'll dissolve this group and replace it with a new one after our work is done, and ride off into the sunset.
• There’s some balance to be struck for integrating code — being safe, but being welcoming to newcomers. So for instance, what’s the process for code review and approving pull requests as our community grows[2]?
• When there is a technical or design conflict, how should that be resolved?
• How do we ensure that all community+corporate stakeholders have a voice in governmental+technical decision-making?
• How do we encourage corporate investment without allowing any one company undue influence over the direction of jj?

The answers to questions like these are what we mean by "governance". Note that we aren’t intending to make technical decisions, but as a part of this process we will establish roles who have the authority to do so.

As a point of reference, both Git and Mercurial both have governance structures as well. Participants aren't just the people who have the most lines of code committed. We don't want jj to be seen as a one-person show (Martin) or a "Google Project" — but as a project led by its community. We want people to see us as we are: a healthy and honest project trying to do honest work. You have to act for the part you want, after all.

This group currently consists of:

• Martin von Zweigbergk (@martinvonz, the maintainer of jj, working on jj on behalf of Google)
• Emily Shaffer (@nasamuffin, working on jj on behalf of Google)
• Khionu Sybiern (@khionu, Edera, working on jj in spare time)
• Waleed Khan (@arxanas, Hudson River Trading, working on jj in spare time)
• Yours truly, Austin Seipp (@thoughtpolice, Kadena, working on jj in spare time)

Thanks for reading! Feel free to reach out to us with questions (GitHub, in #chat, etc)

---

• [1] We owe Chris Krycho and Steve Klabnik some gifts for their tutorials, both of them being responsible for a big influx of users and contributors.
• [2] Currently, about 100 people can create branches in martinvonz/jj. We give most contributors that permission, which is fine. But today that means 100 people can also approve PRs, and hit "Merge" too! We probably need to rein that in, along with automating some other rules: conflict of interest rules, et cetera.