Guidelines of Organisation,
Developer Group Copter!

Final Draft. --- NOT OFFICIAL!

Summary:
All leading positions are delegated by vote, and may be removed by vote. Design decisions are voted upon by all contributing members of the group. Chairman presides meetings, has administrative rights, has backup secretary rights and may ban temporarily or censor misbehavior. Secretary produces reports of design decisions and has backup chairman rights.

Section 1: Membership Structure.

General Notes:
- the term "members" refers to all persons who fall under the five categories below: Group Leaders, Main Developpers, Contributing Members, Members, Benefactors, while the terms "Members" only refers the category Members.
- all of the duties and rights given by any person by these guidelines are inherited up the hierarchy tree unless specific rules are stated. (for example: all the duties and rights that apply to Contributing Members also apply to Main Developers and Group Leaders). In the same sense, a voting right given to Main Developers is implicitly given to Group Leaders. From top to bottom of the inheritance tree, the order is Group Leaders, Main Developers, Contributing Members, Members, Benefactors.

Group Leaders:
- at least one of the two Group Leaders must attend official IRC meetings.
- must read all mailing list posts and documents written/produced by the group.

Chairman:
- shall prepare a list of discussion topics for each meeting.
- shall organize meetings and voting procedures in these meetings.
- shall administrate and maintain the sourceforge project page.
- shall keep the group's well-being, by inviting new members into the group or proposing to redelegate responsibilities.
- shall have the right to split a tied Design Vote.
- shall be the ambassador for the group and the product, and shall represent it duefully.
- shall have Secretary duties and rights if Secretary does not respond within 48 hours or if Secretary position is emtpy.

Secretary:
- shall prepare weekly minutes (summaries), outlining the votes, decisions and ideas of the week, which will be posted on the website.
- shall keep an up-to-date design documentation of game features and architecture decisions, which will be posted on the website.
- shall keep a current list of all members to the project.
- shall have Chairman duties and rights if Chairman does not respond within 48 hours or if Chairman position is empty.

Main Developers:
- all Main Developpers and Group Leaders are suggested to delegate their work to all members and to encourage team work and open source spirit. Core programming:
- shall implement the design decisions as specified in the design documentation written by the Secretary.
Object programming:
- shall coordinate the programming of all objects as specified in the design documentation.
Terrain editor:
- shall be in full charge of developping the terrain editor, while paying attention to suggestions from the group.
Art coordination:
- shall coordinate artistic contributions in accordance to the design documentation.
Webmaster:
- shall maintain, develop and keep up-to-date the copter.sourceforge.net website.

Contributing Members:
- have CVS write permissions, and are actively contributing to the source code, text, images, models or other data on the CVS tree.
- are nominated by a Main Developper, with the consent of the Chairman.

Members:
- are persons who have actively participated in the mailing list with more than ten (non-spam) posts in the last month.

Benefactors:
- are persons who have contributed to the project in any form and at any date.

Section 2: Voting Procedures

General Notes:
- all cast votes are final.
- the term "forum" refers to the bulletin board system posted at http://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=2813, specifically the board "Voting".
- any votes not recorded during the election period are void, and counted as abstentions. Votes recorded before the election period are also void!
- any person may nominate, any person may be nominated.
- if any person holds more than one position, he/she may vote once for every position he holds.

Elections for Member Positions:
Normal Elections:
- take place on the 20th of June, August, October, December, February and April for Group Leaders, and on the 20th of June, October and February for Main Developpers.
- the nomination period ends on the 19th at noon GMT.
- elections shall run over the forum from the 20th at 0:00am GMT for 72 hours.
- all Contributing Members are allowed one vote. In case of a tie, the exiting Chairman may chose to split the tie, or postpone a second vote for no more than 5 days.

Main Developer removal elections:
- can be requested by any Main Developer by posting to the mailing list.
- elections shall run over the forum from the midnight GMT after the request was posted list for 48 hours.
- the Main Developer who was requested to be removed is not allowed to cast a vote.
- if the voting body chooses to remove the requested Main Developer with 2/3 of the votes, then the person must immediately give up his access priviliges that this position allowed him/her. Then there shall be a 2 day nomination period, after which there shall be a 2 day voting period in which the remaining Main Developers elect a nominee into the empty position. In case of a tie, the highest placed Group Leader may split the vote.

Voting for Design Decisions:
- all Contributing Members may vote on a Design Vote.
- a Design Vote must be posted by the Chairman to the forum.
- a Design Vote will stay open for 3 days or until the votes towards one option outweighs any other options plus all abstentions. (for example, a Design Vote has three options, #1 gets 7 votes, #2 gets 1 vote, #3 gets 4 votes, there are 2 abstentions. it is obvious that option #1 will win, so the procedure can be preempted.)
- if less than 33% of the votes (not counting abstentions) have been given to the winning option, there shall be a second round between the two options who received the most votes in the first round.

Section 3: Behavioral Expectations

No Benefactor shall make use of extensive profanity or proclaim insults directed to any person or group of persons. There shall be no flaming or exhaustive and useless argumentation, whether the topics are related to the project or not. The Chairman may temporarily (for a maximal duration of 3 days for the mailing list, 1 hour for IRC) ban offendants from the media they are infecting. The Chairman may also censor/delete any media with offending content. If the Chairman is the offendant, he is expected to resign shortly.

Section 4: Changes to this Document

All changes to this document must be put through a 3 day, forum vote in which 80% of the votes are in favor. All Members may vote, and at least 51% of Members must take part in the vote, or the vote is extended until this condition is met. Anyone can propose a change to this document, the Chairman must conduct the vote no later than 5 days after the proposal has been submitted. Minor changes like corrections to grammar or spelling do not need to be put through a vote.