[Labs-announce] [Tools] Announcing right to fork policy, abandoned tool policy, and Tool Labs standards committee

[Bryan Davis]

Hopefully most of you are aware that over the last several months I
have been working with the Tool Labs community to draft policies to
help ensure that vital tools and bots can live on if their initial
maintainers lose interest or are otherwise prevented from keeping
their projects in good working order. I am very happy to announce that
we now have two policies and a volunteer working committee to help
enforce the policies.

The Tool Labs right to fork policy [0] helps to protect Wikimedia
wikis from loss of a useful tool. It guarantees the right to fork an
existing tool project by developers who are interested in extending
and maintaining it after the original developers have lost interest.

The Tool Labs Abandoned Tool policy [1] helps to protect Wikimedia
wikis from loss of a useful tool. It defines processes for:
* Requesting to be added as co-maintainer of a tool which has no
active maintainers (adoption)
* Requesting removal of inactive maintainers in a tool they have
adopted (usurpation)

The Tool Labs Standards Committee [2] is a group of Wikimedia
volunteers who review, approve, and facilitate access requests for the
source code of Tool Labs hosted tools, and adoption and usurpation of
abandoned tools. Seven outstanding community members have been chosen
to form the initial committee:
* Eran Roz (User:Eranroz)
* James Hare (User:Harej)
* Huji Lee (User:Huji)
* Amir Sarabadani (User:Ladsgroup)
* Matanya (User:Matanya)
* Nick Wilson (User:Quiddity)
* zhuyifei1999 (User:Zhuyifei1999)

There is a lot of work left to be done to establish the basic
operating procedures used by the committee. I am looking forward
working with the committee to help them get started. After some
initial setup I expect them to become self-sufficient in carrying out
the work of evaluating and processing requests from the community.
Please join me both in thanking these individuals for accepting this
responsibility and in helping them support all of us who create and
use tools to make the wikis better.


[0]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Tool_Labs/Right_to_fork_policy
[1]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Tool_Labs/Abandoned_tool_policy
[2]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Tool_Labs/Tool_Labs_standards_committee

Bryan
-- 
Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <bd808 at wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer            Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855