Creating and running a ROS 2 Working Group is currently harder than we’d like, particularly if that Working Group maintains projects as a team. How should it run? What should be the rules? How should decisions be made? The answers to these questions and more were left as exercises to the organizers of the Working Group being created… until now.
Amazon and Canonical, using our experiences from the Tooling and Security working groups as well as input from several other members of the TSC, have been working together to create a Working Group governance template. We’re pleased to announce that it has now been reviewed and approved by the TSC. This means we now have an easy, TSC-approved way to create and run a Working Group!
This template exists as a GitHub repository template. As such, using it is incredibly straightforward:
- Visit the Working Group governance template repository
- Hit the big green “Use this template” button, and choose a place to put it (see https://github.com/ros-security/community or https://github.com/ros-tooling/community as an example)
- Replace the
{{ placeholders }}, filling in the details of your Working Group
That’s it! For specific details into how the governance repository works take a look at the template itself, but here are some highlights of the things included:
- Guidelines for projects maintained by the Working Group
- Breakout of various roles and responsibilities to be filled by members of the Working Group
- Defined processes (pull request and issue templates) for adding/modifying/deprecating projects maintained by the Working Group, and applying for membership or change in role
To be clear, while we hope this proves useful to you, and greatly simplifies the process of getting started with a new Working Group, we don’t mean to imply that this is the only way to create a Working Group. This is merely a way that the TSC has approved. We have worked hard to make this simple and not overly prescriptive, but we’re under no illusions: some Working Groups that adopt this template will need to build on it to fit their particular needs, and it may not work at all for others.
Please feel free to use this in your Working Groups, even if they’re already established! If you have any questions or need clarification, feel free to log issues on the template itself.