Governance Ladder #1861
Description
Again, getting ahead of ourselves, but just to keep notes:
2. 🪜 The Community Ladder: "From User to Maintainer"
A project scales when it has a clear, public path for a new contributor to become a core maintainer. This is the "governance" layer.
Define a Public "Governance Ladder": Don't make it a mystery. Write down what the roles are and how to get them. This turns contribution into a "career path."
Level 1: Contributor: Anyone who submits a successful PR.
Level 2: Member: A regular contributor who is given triage access (can label issues, close duplicates).
Level 3: Reviewer: An expert in one "village" who is trusted to review PRs for that area.
Level 4: Maintainer: A "lieutenant" (like in the CODEOWNERS file) who can approve and merge PRs in their area.
Create Teams (The Rust Model): The Rust project is a masterclass in this. It isn't one giant team; it's dozens of small, focused working groups (WGs) and teams (e.g., "WG-parser-performance," "Team-Compiler," "Team-Docs").
This lets people join a small "village" with a clear mission.
It gives you, the project lead, a single point of contact (@team-parser-lead) instead of 50 individual contributors.