Decision process
This is the light-weight decision process used for project-related decisions in the gnucash project. The GnuCash Core Team agreed on this process in March 2016.
Contents
Mission Statement
The GnuCash core team will work to further the goal of the GnuCash project [1]: To provide free personal and small-business financial- accounting software, designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible.
Types of Decisions
Two types of decisions are concerned in this process: We distinguish "high impact" decisions and "low impact" decisions.
- The "high impact" decisions include authorization to spend large amounts of money (>=$1000 [2]), as well as partnerships, such as joining software conservancy, and also policy changes, or the delegation of decision tasks to particular individuals in order to have them act in the name of the project.
- The "low impact" decisions include adding new members to the "core team" (explained below), or authorizations for smaller amounts of money (<$1000), or other decisions on which the project can change its mind easily with almost no losses.
Core Team Membership
Decisions are made according to the following process by a "Core Team" of people who have made significant contributions to the GnuCash project as developers, documenters, administrators, by offering user support, or in other ways. Core team members are expected to participate in decisions at least to the point of registering agreement or disagreement with every proposal. Core team members are subscribed to the non-public gnucash-core@gnucash.org mailing list and are expected to monitor that list regularly. Contributors may join the core team either by requesting to or by being nominated by a current core team member and being approved by the "low impact" decision process. Core team members may resign at any time, and members who have not exercised their decision making responsibilities for more than 1 year may be asked to resign by any other core team member.
The core team and the non-public mailing list gnucash-core, as of November 2016, has 9 (nine) members.
Decision Process
The process begins with a proposal, which may be offered by any core team member, posted to the gnucash-core mailing list. Proposals should describe what is to be done, who is to do it, any monetary expense required, and how the action furthers the goals of the organization.
Proposals are accepted or rejected using the "Consent Decision Making" practice from the "Sociocracy" form of organization [3][4][5]. Each core team member should consider the proposal on its merits and with respect to the project goals in the context of previous decisions and express either assent (support) or objections on the mailing list. The criterion for assent is that the proposal is "Good enough for now and safe enough to try" [6] and furthers the goals of the organization; team members who believe otherwise should raise an objection explaining the objection and if possible outlining improvements that might overcome it. Supporters and objectors should then negotiate changes to resolve the objections. In our variation of the Sociocracy process we additionally allow some members to express indifference and others to not participate; a proposal can be accepted if a certain number of core team members assent or express indifference and none object as detailed below. A certain amount of time that depends on the impact level is allowed to gather the requisite assents; the number of assents required also depends upon the impact level.
It is incumbent upon proposers, supporters, and objectors to work closely together to resolve the objections. All participants should recognize and respect that everyone wants to find the best way to further the project's goals, but that it's seldom apparent what is the best way forward without discussion and experimentation. "Concerns are not objections and don't stop proposals from being agreed, but often contain wisdom and may be the basis of useful criteria for evaluating and refining the agreed action or policy after it's implemented." (paraphrased from [6]).
Decision Thresholds
- High-impact decisions require that 75% of the core team assent or express indifference and that no-one raises new objections within 3 weeks of the proposal or the last objection being resolved.
- Low-impact decisions require that 50% of the core team assents or expresses indifference and that no-one raises new objections within 10 days of the proposal or the last objection being resolved.
If 100% of the team assents or expresses indifference the decision is confirmed without the need to complete the waiting period for new objections.
References
- ↑ http://www.gnucash.org
- ↑ The threshold amount is meant as follows: Does the decision concern one or more payments totaling to this amount of money in the near future, e.g., as a single payment or as multiple payments over the next, say, 12 months.
- ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy#Consent_vs._consensus
- ↑ http://www.reinventingorganizationswiki.com/Decision_Making (scroll down to the heading "Consent based decision making")
- ↑ In German: http://intrinsify.me/Blog/items/verbunden-im-konsent-was-ist-soziokratie.html
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 http://sociocracy30.org/the-details/circles-and-decision-making/
