Proposal to enable sub-project maintainers to vote for new Org maintainers

[yizha1]

This issue is a follow-up to the community meeting held on January 2, 2024 and aims to build a consensus on enabling sub-project maintainers to vote for new org maintainers. The current governance guide states that "only current org maintainers are eligible to vote by casting a single vote each via a -1/+1 comment on the nomination issue or approving in GitHub". Although the current governance guide works well if the majority of Org maintainers remain active, it can be challenging to reach a majority of votes if most Org maintainers are not active. This can lead to either months-long elections or no results at all.

The proposal is to enable sub-project maintainers to vote for new Org maintainers. The votes for Org maintainers can be split into two parts: votes by current Org maintainers and votes by sub-project maintainers. If the votes by current Org maintainers cannot be completed in time (for example, 3 weeks) due to inactivity of Org maintainers or other unexpected reasons (such as not reachable), new Org maintainers can be elected by a two-thirds supermajority vote of sub-project maintainers.

Tag Org and sub-project maintainers for comments. Please comment +1 or LGTM if you support the proposal. Other proposals are welcome, and we can discuss them in this issue and reach consensus.

@NiazFK @justincormack @SteveLasker @cipherboy @OliverShang @FeynmanZhou @HuKeping @JeyJeyGao @duffney @gokarnm @mnm678 @priteshbandi @Two-Hearts @rgnote @iamsamirzon @toddysm @shizhMSFT @vaninrao10 @yizha1

+1

[toddysm]

+1
Current governance puts too much power in the org maintainers and not enough power to the community. While the proposal above is a good step toward increasing the power of the community, we should look at the process to make sure that a single, overrepresented organization does not sway the votes in one direction. We should update the governance documents with a clear voting process.