A new Governance Model for Liqo
Liqo was born as a university project in 2019.
As often happens in research-derived projects, the relationships among developers, contributors and any other stakeholders were arranged in a friendly (and completely unstructured) way. This simplified our operations, but it is not appropriate when the project becomes industrially relevant and new people, backed by their companies, come into play, leaving enthusiastic volunteers dedicating part of their spare time to the project as a remember from the past.
This happened to Liqo as well. We become officially a spin-off of the Politecnico di Torino in July 2023, and we reached the 1000 GitHub stars in Apr 2024, honestly, without doing almost any form of promotion for our project.
However, it is time to move on, and a new step towards a more structured open-source project has come.
We defined a simple, albeit appropriate for us, governance model, we discussed it with our many friends who were part of the project, and we merged it on Apr 19, 2024. This model formalizes the roles and responsibilities of different people within the community, namely supporters, contributors, component leaders, maintainers, and owners (details on the Liqo Governance page). Furthermore, it defines the requirements and the rules to move from one role to another, and when it is time, for a person, to step back.
In the end, this makes no changes in the way we work, and how we drive our project. But it provides a solid ground to establish a fruitful collaboration with other companies that are interested to contribute to the Liqo source base, pushing for a bigger, more solid, (always open source) project.
