[RFC] Project governance, Maintainer's guide

GOVERNANCE.md

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+# Project governance
+
+The tldr-pages project strives to have an **open**, **welcoming**,
+and [**non-hierarchical**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_organization)
+governance structure.
+
+To that end, this document describes the principles
+that guide the self-management of the project.
+By having them written down explicitly, and open to scrutiny,
+the entire community can read, improve and adapt them as needed,
+with no central authority.
+
+
+## I. Participation and community interactions
+
+- **All contributions are welcome**,
+  [no matter how small](https://github.com/kentcdodds/all-contributors).
+  The tldr-pages project is a [do-ocracy](https://communitywiki.org/wiki/DoOcracy),
+  so don't hesitate to get involved — we're happy to welcome you into the community!
+  Please take a look at [CONTRIBUTING.md](https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md)
+  to get started.
+
+- All members of the community are expected to **be cordial in all communications**.
+  Avoid making assumptions about the others' intentions, and make your own intentions clear.
+  When in doubt, provide additional context, or ask for clarification.
+  Remember, it's very hard to convey meaning on a purely written medium,
+  especially between people from different cultures, technical backgrounds,
+  English proficiency levels, etc.
+
+- **All communications are public**.
+  There are no permanent private channels where maintainers discuss "internal" matters.
+  Occasional private chat messages may be exchanged,
+  e.g. when setting up services that require passwords,
+  but otherwise all exchanges that impact the project either happen in issue or PR discussions,
+  or in the [Gitter chat room](https://gitter.im/tldr-pages/tldr)
+  (which is open to all, and publicly logged).
+
+- **All decisions are made by community consensus.**
+  This does not mean there has to be unanimity,
+  nor that decisions result from vote counts.
+  What it means is that every interested member of the community can voice their thoughts,
+  and different positions are ideally resolved via
+  [informed consent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy#Consent_vs._consensus)
+  of the involved people, who accept the collective decision
+  as "good enough for now, safe enough to try".
+
+
+## II. Role transitions
+
+The main goal of these principles is to support a continuous replenishing of the management team
+via a **smooth transition flow between community roles** —
+from newcomer, to occasional contributor, to regular contributor, to maintainer.
+This way the project can adapt in a flexible way
+to the the natural variations in availability and interest of its contributors,
+ensuring long-term resilience,
+and avoiding [single points of failure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor).
+
+To this end, rather than assigning roles and tasks to people,
+these guidelines instead aim to **recognize the work that people already do**.
+Everyone is therefore encouraged to get involved and contribute to the project in whatever way they prefer,
+and we will strive to **get barriers out of the way** of these contributions.
+
+To ensure that these processes are transparent, predictable, and free from subective judgment,
+the metrics used are simple, objective, and publicly available.
+
+- Regular contributors shall be recognized as collaborators in the organization.
+
+    - Specifically: once a contributor has had **5 pull requests merged**,
+      they should be invited to become a
+      [**member of the tldr-pages organization**](https://github.com/orgs/tldr-pages/people).
+      This means they will be able to push commits to all of the organization's repositories,
+      merge PRs, label and close issues, among other things.
+      Note: All members of the tldr-pages organization must make their membership public.
+
+- Members of the organization who demonstrate interest in performing maintainership tasks,
+  by reviewing and/or merging PRs, responding to and labeling issues, and generally doing project maintenance work,
+  shall be made part of the maintenance team, and their name added to the list of current maintainers
+  in the [MAINTAINERS.md](MAINTAINERS.md) file.
+
+    - Specifically: once a contributor has been an organization member for at least 3 months,
+      and has **reviewed or merged 10 pull requests** by other contributors,
+      they should be invited to become an **owner of the tldr-pages organization**.
+      This means they will be able to add people to the organization,
+      manage all the organization's repositories, configure integrations, etc.
+
+- If a collaborator or maintainer stops being active in the project for more than 6 months,
+  their membership status will be equally deactivated,
+  and their name added to the list of former maintainers in the MAINTAINERS.md file.
+  Again, this is and merely a reflection of their actual involvement with the project,
+  not a demotion or punishment. In fact, if they return to active participation in the project,
+  they should be re-added back to the organization, to reflect that fact.
+
+    - This inactivity threshold additionally ensures
+      that the list of organization members doesn't grow to unwieldy sizes,
+      and that it accurately reflects the active team managing the project.

MAINTAINERS.md

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+## Current maintainers
+
+The following people are the current owners of the tldr-pages organization,
+and have admin access to all of its repositories.
+
+- Romain Prieto `<[email protected]>` (@rprieto)
+- Igor Shubovych `<[email protected]>` (@igorshubovych)
+- Ruben Vereecken `<[email protected]>` (@rubenvereecken)
+- Waldir Pimenta `<[email protected]>` (@waldyrious)
+- Felix Yan `<[email protected]>` (@felixonmars)
+- Leandro Ostera `<[email protected]>` (@ostera)
+- Agniva De Sarker `<[email protected]>` (@agnivade)
+- Starbeamrainbowlabs `<[email protected]>` (@sbrl)
+
+## Past maintainers
+
+The following people are former maintainers of the tldr-pages project,
+who have moved on to other projects.
+Their contributions and dedication have ensured the success of the tldr project,
+and for that they'll always be appreciated.

contributing-guides/maintainers-guide.md

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+# Maintainer's guide
+
+The following guidelines are meant to provide a general basis
+for the behavior expected of tldr-pages maintainers:
+
+- When responding to issues or pull requests,
+  remember that you're temporarily the face of the tldr-pages project.
+  **Be welcoming and friendly**, and if you don't know how to answer,
+  ping other maintainers who you think might have a say.
+
+- Although push access allows committing directly to master,
+  plase **create pull requests for all of your changes**,
+  except the simplest ones (e.g. typo fixes).
+  This ensures that the entire process other contributors go through
+  is exposed to maintainers, who can then identify and address bottlenecks or inconveniences.
+  Similarly, **avoid merging your own PRs**.
+
+- Ideally, **every new discussion should receive a response within 24 hours**.
+  You can respond yourself or ask other members to provide their thoughts/opinions.
+
+- When mergin PRs, use the strategy that produces a **clean git history** in the repository:
+  Use squash if there's a single commit in the PR, or if the multiple commits are not independent changes.
+  If the PR author took the time to craft individual, informative commit messages for each commit,
+  use regular merge to honor that work and preserve the history of the changes.
+
+- **Know when and how to say no**.
+  Sometimes requests or contributions need to be declined, at least in their current form.
+  The project has developed multiple guidelines over time to handle edge cases
+  — get acquainted with them, and point them out when necessary.
+  Be polite, but firm: it saves everyone's time and patience to make expectations clear early.
+
+- Always remember to **thank every contribution**,
+  even when it can't be accepted (in fact, especially then).
+  Keep in mind that [every form of contribution](https://github.com/kentcdodds/all-contributors)
+  (pull request, feature request, bug report, etc.)
+  is a voluntary gift of time offered to the tldr project by someone who cares about it,
+  so make sure not to take it for granted.