The current governance rules outline roles for Contributors, Maintainers, and Steering Committee members. As the Paketo project has grown and evolved, contributors, maintainers, and steering committee members have come and gone. While the current governance rules do outline how those folks might resign or be removed from their positions, we'd like to establish a third option, retirement. In the case that a member of one of these teams is found to have retired from the project, they will be an emeritus position at their current role title.
We'd like a way to prune the set of folks with elevated permissions on the project while still acknowledging the work done by these individuals. We can remove inactive individuals with the current governance rules, but we'd also like to recognize their contributions to the project.
This RFC will function as an addendum to RFC 0002. For each role defined in that RFC, we will establish a retirement clause stating that individuals may retire and accept an emeritus title at their current role title for any subteam. Functionally, the emeritus title is purely honorific and imbues the holder with no voting status or permissions for that subteam.
We could keep the current rules and provide no emeritus title.
A subteam contributor or maintainer, or steering committee member can retire by sending notice to either a subteam maintainer, or a steering committee member.
Alternatively, a contributor or maintainer may be retired by a supermajority vote from the subteam maintainers. This is similar to a vote to remove that contributor or maintainer, but also confers the retiree with the emeritus title. Steering committee members can also be retired, but with a supermajority vote from the existing steering committee membership.
Once retired, the retiree will be granted with an emeritus title. They will also be removed from their current role in GitHub teams and their new title will be recorded in the teams roster on the community repository.