Decision Process

Who takes decisions in this project?
We should always try to reach consensus by discussion. However, in case a consensus can't be reached within the community, the community leadership council votes to take a decision and allow the project to move forward (see Benevolent Dictators). The current members of the council are: David Blanchard and Xavier Antoviaque.

Relationship between the company and the project
A way to look at the relationship between the company and the projects (like HackIt) is to consider that the company is actually one of many contributors to the HackIt project. An obviously important one, as it provides a large part of the funding and development efforts, and because its founders are also providing leadership for the project, but the distinction is important. A good example to study is the way the Ubuntu project is structured - Canonical, the company, is the main sponsor of the project, and its CEO is also the benevolent dictator for the project, but they obviously have different constraints - pretty much the same way different individual contributors within a project focus on different things. The idea is still to work together, and it usually works quite well!

Involvement of the community in the company
If we use this analogy, what is the role of the community regarding the decisions who only concern the company, such as choosing the company name for example? Obviously, it would not come to anyone's mind to ask the community to decide any of the individual contributors' nickname, so should we ask anyone's opinion about the company name? It will depend on specific cases, but there are quite a few good reasons to always try to do it as much as possible: First, because it allows us to take a better decision. It allows to get more ideas, to know what everyone likes more - after all, how good can be a name if we are the only ones to like it? Second, because we can hardly pretend to embrace the free software philosophy if we don't take the lessons it gives and apply it to ourselves - it doesn't mean that we will always follow the majority, but that we should always try to be open to new ideas, to be transparent and and to take into account everyone's input. To say it differently, it's part of building the brand of the company, so we need to be consistent. And third, because everyone in the community is a bit part of the company - remember that the community is supposed to be part of the company board. Also, a part of the community is or will end up working contractually (either through employment or freelancers) for the company at some point. The company is bigger than the founders and its employees : )

Benevolent Dictators
See the extract from "Producing Open Source Software"