Review and organize overall project team structure

[ehuss]

This is a bit nebulous, but the overall idea is to:

• Determine the overall shape of the project.
  • Determine who or which teams are actually part of the project.
  • Establish guidelines for determining whether or not to accept a new team in the project.
• Ensure all teams and other governance structures are "attached" to appropriate places in the structure. (This includes working with teams to find appropriate homes, and ensuring such changes are ultimately reflected in the team metadata repository.)

I seem to recall there are some ambiguities, but I don't remember what they were exactly.

See also #32 for specific considerations of the top-level team arrangement.

[carols10cents]

And are there people we would want to consider "part of the project" that aren't on a team? For the purposes of consulting people about a decision?

[rylev]

I believe rfcs#3392 is somewhat explicit about ensuring that everyone is part of the project through a team because this makes answering a question of why they are part of the project much more straightforward. If we ever want a "group of people whose opinions we value" we should make that a team and have explicit criteria for inclusion.

[jonathanpallant]

And are there people we would want to consider "part of the project" that aren't on a team? For the purposes of consulting people about a decision?

I guess that depends on whether we think a Working Group is a Team? The Rust Embedded Working Group is in the teams repo, but sits under the Launching Pad team.

[rylev]

rust-lang/rfcs#3392 considers working groups teams in the wider sense of the word (i.e., a governance structure). Everyone considered a part of the Rust project is a member of a governance structure (i.e., a team, subteam, working group, project group) that ultimately "reports up" through a top-level team into the Council. The RFC was purposefully worded as such to avoid any "dangling" members - i.e., there should never be anyone in the Project who does not have Council representation and Council representation is determined by the Council rep for the top-level team the governance structure(s) the person is on reports up through.

[traviscross]

We discussed this today in our meeting, as it is marked as high priority but has not seen an update on this issue in some time.

This is one of three items that was identified by the originally-seated council as high priority last year. We talked about how perhaps this could be split out, as while there is seemingly still work to do here, we'd like to have a way to identify when this work is done. That is, we'd like to have a clear completion criteria. We also talked about how we've had more success with small incremental steps rather than trying to do one big reorg.

This item may be related to ongoing work to establish team charters and to sunset working groups. @ehuss and @jamesmunns volunteered to own this follow-up.