nvm charter review

[ljharb]

The final item on nvm's onboarding checklist is CPC approval of the project charter (this issue was requested in today's meeting).

This commit (on my personal fork) will be pushed to the main nvm repo soon; in the meantime, it's ready for CPC review: https://github.com/ljharb/nvm/blob/HEAD/PROJECT_CHARTER.md

@openjs-foundation/cpc: please comment with any feedback, or please 👍 -react to the OP to indicate approval.

[bnb]

provided some feedback, LGTM.

[mhdawson]

Seems ok to me.

[tobie]

This is simple and to the point. I would encourage you to simplify the language around "The Team," "Maintainers," and "nvm's Team Governing Body" which all point to the same entity and just use "Maintainers" everywhere. Additionally, I'd recommend also defining that term in section 5. LGTM otherwise.

[ljharb]

@tobie i can certainly use the same term; my hope was to not need to change the charter in the future when/if i get more maintainers. Thoughts?

[tobie]

my hope was to not need to change the charter in the future when/if i get more maintainers.

I don't think you're making a distinction in the charter between The Team and The Maintainers, so that really shouldn't be an issue as long as you make sure to always pluralize Maintainers.

[eemeli]

Overall looks good, but the definitions of "Contributors", "Maintainers" and "Team" is a bit unclear. Not because they're not well defined, but because they're defined in multiple places. I'd second @tobie on dropping "Team" entirely, and just referring to "Maintainers", as that appears to be intended to be synonymous. Especially as the alternative understanding is that "Team" also includes "Contributors", and that would be almost 300 people currently.

Additionally, where are the individual "Maintainers" listed? If the text of README.md and GOVERNANCE.md were to disagree, which would be considered the canonical source? It might be easier to update the Section 2 & 3 "team" or "maintainers" links to also point at GOVERNANCE.md, leaving the "Team" section of the README.md more clearly as just informative.

It might also be easier to refer to GOVERNANCE.md in Section 5 for the "Maintainer" and "Contributor" definitions, as that would avoid the current slight difference between the definitions of that term in the two documents.

But all that is nitpicking, tbh. It does look good, especially for a one-maintainer project!

[SaraJo]

LGTM. Agreed on just maintainers being more intuitive. (or Maintainer).

[ljharb]

Thanks for everyone's feedback!

Contributors are widely understood to be "anyone whose work is included in the project" (and are explicitly defined already in the charter), and "team"/"maintainers" to me explicitly means "people with decision-making authority for the project". I'll definitely consolidate those terms; thanks for the feedback. I've also added "Maintainers" to the definitions list in the charter alongside "contributors".

@eemeli The charter points at the README, thus that's the source of truth for "who is a Maintainer". GOVERNANCE is for describing the roles and responsibilities of Maintainers, not their identities (per the relevant section in the charter).

I've updated the branch; any additional thoughts?

[tobie]

I've updated the branch; any additional thoughts?

Nope, this is perfect. Ship it!

[ljharb]

Confirmed in today's CPC meeting that the charter has been approved.