Minimum Viable Governance

What is Minimum Viable Governance?

Minimum Viable Governance (MVG) - currently in beta - is a repository-based approach for putting lightweight governance into free and open source projects that are run in version control systems. It provides an overall two-tier organizational governance structure for a set of free and open source projects. At the top level (called an "organization" on GitHub), there is a technical steering committee to make decisions about the overall direction and coordination between all the organization's projects. Underneath that top level are the individual projects, with lightweight, consensus-based governance.

There are two folders. The first, org-docs, provides top-level organizational governance and policies for a technical steering committee (TSC). The second folder, project-docs, provides a template for individual project governance, subject to the policies and oversight of the larger organization.

Minimum Viable Governance is meant as a way to quickly stand up collaborations that can grow with your organization and projects. If your organization grows to the point where a corporate home becomes necessary, typically when your organization begins holding money, MVG is designed to make that transition easy.

Why would we want to use this?

Minimum Viable Governance allows you to start an organization and sub-projects with simple governance in place at the outset - including legal terms, licensing and trademark issues, and due process. Having this governance in place early helps avoid disputes among participants down the road.

How do we use this?

1. Review the documents and determine if this is right for you.
2. Describe the organization's mission in Section 1 of the CHARTER.md file.
3. Put the org-docs in a repository for the organization's governance and have each initial TSC member "sign" the STEERING-COMMITTEE.md file by adding their name and organizational affiliation (if applicable) to the file.
4. For each project that will be under your organization's governance, create a repository under the organization and have each initial maintainer "sign" the MAINTAINERS.md file by adding their name and affiliation (if applicable) to the file.
5. Choose a license or fill out the copyright information in the MIT LICENSE.md file for each project.
6. Get to work.

Contributing

Hi there! We're thrilled that you'd like to contribute to this project. Your help is essential for keeping it great.

Contributions to this project are released to the public under the project's open source license.

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct (CoC). By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms. Violations of the CoC should be reported to: opensource@github.com. To avoid confusion with MVG artifacts, we did not place the CoC in the repo.

Submitting a pull request

1. Fork and clone the repository
2. Create a new branch: git checkout -b my-branch-name
3. Make your change
4. Push to your fork and submit a pull request
5. Pat yourself on the back and wait for your pull request to be reviewed and merged.