Create Notary project GOVERNANCE.md

[yizha1]

The Notary governance document GOVERNANCE.md should cover the following aspects:

• The Notary project intro
• Maintainers Structure
• Org Maintainers responsibility
• Process of stepping down, process of onboarding new org maintainers
• Subproject Maintainers responsibility
• Process of stepping down, process of onboarding new Subproject maintainers
• Maintainers health state and regular review process for maintainers
• Decision Making at the Notary org level
• Code of Conduct
• DCO and Licenses

[yizha1]

Repo .github is the organization-wide repository for common governance documents. There is an existing governance guide under sub-project Notary, see https://github.com/notaryproject/notary/blob/master/GOVERNANCE.md.

• Option1: Copy existing governance.md from Notary repo to .github repo, and update it if needed, then delete the one under sub-repo Notary.
• Option2: Create a new one under .github and keep the existing one under Notary repo as it is.

Any other options? Looking for comments from the maintainers and community.

[FeynmanZhou]

I vote for 1. The existing Notary governance doc is reusable and most of the content is still applicable to our community. We could migrate it to this repo and iterate it.

Instead, it will confuse people if an organization has two different governance guidelines. I seldom see separate governance in a subproject.

[priteshbandi]

+1 for option1

[vaninrao10]

+1 for option 1, but if we plan to move away from Notary and keep Notation we need to have appropriate plan in place.

[toddysm]

We agreed a while back that we will move the governance documents from the notary repo to this one. Let's do that first and we can amend those after that if needed. We should move not only the GOVERNANCE but also the other governance docs like
https://github.com/notaryproject/notary/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
https://github.com/notaryproject/notary/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
https://github.com/notaryproject/notary/blob/master/PROJECTS

+1 on Option #1

[yizha1]

+1 for option 1, but if we plan to move away from Notary and keep Notation we need to have appropriate plan in place.

@vaninrao10 could you explain what do you mean "keep Notation"? Both notary and notation are sub-projects under notary project. The governance.md should be placed under .github repo as notary project level governance doc.

[yizha1]

I will vote for option 1 as well. Now we have 5 out of 9 MAINTAINERS vote for option 1. We can make decision on Mar 20 community call.

[yizha1]

Steps (to be confirmed in community meeting on Mar 30)

1. Create a PR in .github to copy the below doc from notary repo to .github repo
   • https://github.com/notaryproject/notary/blob/master/GOVERNANCE.md
   • https://github.com/notaryproject/notary/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
   • https://github.com/notaryproject/notary/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
   • https://github.com/notaryproject/notary/blob/master/PROJECTS
2. Create a new PR in .github to address the amendment
3. After the above two PRs are merged, create a PR in notary repo to remove the three documents.

[toddysm]

There was an agreement in one of the community calls a few weeks back. Can't we just create the PR and copy the docs? There will be no changes to the docs as it was agreed upon in the community call. BTW, the maintainers of the notary repo should agree on removing the docs from that repo.

[iamsamirzon]

LGTM

[yizha1]

Updates:

• One issue was created to remove governance doc in notary repo. Proposal to remove governance docs and refer to those in org-wide repo .github notary#1672

[toddysm]

LGTM. Is there a PR for this work already created?

[yizha1]

@toddysm this PR #17, which was merged yesterday. The next step is to create a PR in notary repo to remove the gov docs after notary sub-project maintainers are aligned.

[toddysm]

Closing this one as per #17