Governance document

Template from http://outercurve.org/resources/governance/consensus_with_pmc.html

From that:

"This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
This work is based upon "Meritocratic Governance Model" by University of Oxford.  "

share/governance.md

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+Vox Pupuli Governance
+====================
+
+
+Roles and Responsibilities
+--------------------------
+
+In order to have a smoothly running project, formal roles with corresponding responsibilities are established. A member of the community may have multiple roles.
+
+
+Users
+-----
+
+
+Users are community members who have a need for the project. They are the most important members of the community: without them, the project would have no purpose. Anyone can be a user; there are no specific requirements. Users should be encouraged to participate in the life of the project and the community as much as possible. User contributions enable the project team to ensure that they are satisfying the needs of those users. Common user activities include (but are not limited to):
+
+* advocating for use of the project
+* informing developers of project strengths and weaknesses from a new user’s perspective
+* providing moral support (a ‘thank you’ goes a long way)
+* writing documentation and tutorials
+* filing bug reports and feature requests
+* participating on the discussion board
+
+
+Users who continue to engage with the project and its community will often find themselves becoming more and more involved. Such users may then go on to become contributors, as described below.
+
+*How to become one*: Use a Vox Pupuli project
+
+
+Collaborators
+-------------
+
+
+Collaborators are community members who submit patches to the project. These patches may be a one-time occurrence or occur over time. Expectations are that contributors will submit patches that are small at first and will only grow larger once the contributor has built confidence in the quality of their patches.
+
+*How to become one*: Submit a pull request to a Vox Pupuli project
+
+
+Contributors
+------------
+
+
+Contributors are collaborators who have shown wide dedication to the Vox Pupuli project in general or deep dedication to one project in particular, and the ability to work well with collaborators and users. The contributors have responsibilities beyond the collaborators. In particular, contributors formally decide on whether a pull request is merged or a release is cut. Contributors are recognized and valued for their contributions, in whatever form those contributions take. Tasks such as communication, documentation, art, packaging, and testing are all valued contributions. A contributor will use lazy consensus to decide on whether to merge a pull request from a collaborator. If the discussion is no longer moving towards a consensus, the PMC must vote via lazy consensus on whether the patch should be applied.
+
+*How to become one*: Be a collaborator and be nominated to the PMC as a contributor. Nominations should be sent to <email address for nominations>. You may nominate yourself. It is also common to give contributor status to an individual who donates code to the project by migrating a repository to the github namespace.
+
+
+Project Management Committee (PMC)
+----------------------------------
+
+
+The project management committee has responsibilities beyond contributors that include participating in strategic planning, release planning, and approving changes to the governance model. They also have the duty of upholding the community code of conduct and ensuring its values. The PMC is also responsible for updating the community code of conduct. It also makes decisions when community consensus cannot be reached. 
+
+The PMC has final say over who can become a committer and will use lazy consensus for approval. Discussion over committer nominations will be done in private.
+
+Membership of the PMC is by election. Condorcet(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method) voting is held once a year. A non-running election official is appointed by the PMC and runs the election. There are 5 members of the PMC. Terms are 1 year.
+
+*How to become one*: Win in the yearly election.
+
+
+
+Lazy Consensus
+--------------
+
+Lazy consensus is a very important concept within the project. It is this process that allows a large group of people to efficiently reach consensus, as someone with no objections to a proposal need not spend time stating their position, and others need not spend time reading such statements.
+
+For lazy consensus to be effective, it is necessary to allow at least 72 hours before assuming that there are no objections to the proposal. This requirement ensures that everyone is given enough time to read, digest and respond to the proposal. This time period is chosen so as to be as inclusive as possible of all participants, regardless of their location and time commitments.
+
+We do require one affirmative vote as part of the Lazy consensus model.
+
+Vox Pupuli has a public mailing list. This list is low-traffic and is for discussion of anything Vox Pupuli related. Controversial patches, nominations for promotion, policy shifts, and anything else can be brought to this list. All contributors and PMC members are expected to be on this list. Release announcements will go out to this list, but will have ``[Release]`` in the subject line so they can be easily filtered.
+
+
+
+
+PMC Removal
+-----------
+
+A member of the PMC can be removed before the end of their 1 year term by a supermajority (2/3) vote of the PMC. This can happen for a number of reasons, but the expected reason is following a Code of Conduct violation incident. A member of the PMC can step down at any time.
+
+If a vacancy is left on the PMC, the PMC can optionally instruct the elections officer to perform another election or wait until the next election cycle.
+
+
+Transparency
+------------
+
+Building community trust in the governance of an open-source project is vital to its success. To that end, decision making must be done in a transparent, open fashion. No decisions about the project’s direction, bug fixes or features may be done without community involvement and participation. Discussions must begin at the earliest possible point on a topic; the community’s participation is vital during the entire decision-making process.
+
+
+
+Election
+--------
+
+The details of the election process are up to the elections officer, subject to approval by the PMC. The users, collaborators, and contributors all get to vote in the election.