[VOTE] Clarify Community Strategy Decision Process #15521
Description
Hi Community:
This is a formal procedural voting thread about the proposal to clarify the community strategy
decision process. The main intent here is for the community to collectively choose how we
would like to make strategic decisions in the TVM community.
This is a procedural decision on how we would make strategic decisions. The ASF process enables
the community to have a collective conversation that gains clarity of everyone’s view and then
comes to a resolution together. The vote for procedural issues takes a majority binding.
We have had many related conversations over the past year. We know that there are different
opinions on how we should operate as a community. We also know what process roughly looks like
under each category of opinions. This vote is for accepting a version that aims to provide a clear and
concise process for strategy decisions (see text below). I pick this one as this seems to be what
most prefer in the discussions (of course, the community should decide whether accepting it).
I would encourage everyone to take a look at the RFC and discussion thread[1][2] so you are aware
of all the views before casting your vote
[1] apache/tvm-rfcs#102
[2] https://discuss.tvm.apache.org/t/process-rfc-clarify-community-strategy-decision-process/15463/10
Summary
Machine Learning Compilation (MLC) is an emerging field in fast development.
With the tremendous help from the whole community, it’s exciting to see that TVM
delivers significant needs from and to developers and thus has become widely popular
in both academia and industry. As the community pushes for different goals that help each other,
naturally, there are strategy decision points about overall directions and new modules adoptions.
These decisions are not fine-grained code-level changes but are important for a
community to be viable in the long term. The process of bringing those changes is less
clarified to the community, and hurdles can be high. We have made attempts in the past to
bring more verbose processes, but this has proven to be less successful. One observation
is that it is hard for broader volunteer developers and community members to follow complicated
processes. Additionally, different members can have different interpretations of how to do things,
leading to stagnation and lack of participation from volunteer members. We are in a different world
now in the case of ML/AI ecosystem, and it is critical for the community to be able to make
collective decisions together and empower the community. Following the practices of existing
ASF projects (e.g. hadoop), we propose to use a simple process for strategic decisions.
Proposal: Strategy Decision Process
We propose the following clarification of the strategy decision process: It takes lazy 2/3 majority
(at least 3 votes and twice as many +1 votes as -1 votes) of binding decisions to make the following
strategic decisions in the TVM community:
- Adoption of a guidance-level community strategy to enable new directions or overall project evolution.
- Establishment of a new module in the project.
- Adoption of a new codebase: When the codebase for an existing, released product is to be replaced
with an alternative codebase.If such a vote fails to gain approval, the existing code base will continue.
This also covers the creation of new sub-projects within the project.
All these decisions are made after community conversations that get captured as part of the summary.
This vote will be open for at least one week, please vote:
+1 If you support we adopt the above process
-0
-1 because...