nodejs
Update charter with communication responsibilities
It has been brought up in https://github.com/nodejs/admin/issues/977#issuecomment-3001258778.
Once we are settled with some text, we should bring this to the CPC - I expect it might require a change to the CPC Charter itself, which would need to be board-ratified.
I think that we can use some rethinking of the roles of TSC/foundation in terms of communication. I re-read https://nodejs.org/en/blog/uncategorized/trademark and IMO, there are two roles in the communications:
- Use of the trademark
- The foundation's role is to administer it, they have the authority over whether it can or cannot be used, whether use of it is against the policy.
- The TSC's role is to watch its use and report/request when necessary (like everyone else in the community)
- Representation of the project, both the technical work and the community behind the technical work
- The foundation's role is to support it, or watch/advise when necessary/requested
- The TSC's role is to establish process to build representation via consensus seeking, and make sure everyone, including itself, respect the process before a representation of the project is made. It's what we've effectively been doing for years.
The communication of the project is not just marketing, it's also a device we use to manifest the representation of the project, and to the eye of an external reader, the use of the trademark verifies the representation. However those two are not to be mixed:
- Use of the trademark does not imply that it correctly and accurately represents the project. Mistakes happen e.g. when someone pushes a button to publish a post from the official account representing the project without consulting others in the project at all, no matter this person works for the foundation or is a member of the TSC, this post is misrepresenting the project because we operate by consensus seeking and collectivism.
- Representation of the project does not always have to be certified by the use of the trademark. For example someone may say an personal opinion using a personal account and this may still get interpreted as "Node.js team thinks that..." if they are seen as a representative of the project and the use of "we" is ambiguous.
Both the TSC and the foundation have the role to make sure the two are properly aligned in the communications that can be interpreted as official. While it might be possible for the foundation to take over 2, the reality is that the foundation doesn't necessarily have the staff to take on this much work from just one of the many projects is supports, while TSC has been effectively doing 2 for a very long time and generally are more careful/experienced in making sure that nobody should act on the behalf of the project without seeking consensus from other project members (the most recent being establishing the process and collecting consensus about pride campaign, and deliberately making the vote org-wide, not TSC-wide) , most of the time on GitHub, where the community lives, with the use of GitHub pull requests, the tool that the community is the most familiar with, to ensure accuracy when accuracy is needed.
I think the goal of the charter change should be to codify our role in 2 - it's not necessarily a proposal to increase our scope, but just documenting in the charter what we have already been doing for years, even though the charter doesn't explicitly say so (but somewhat implies this).
I've opened a separate PR (https://github.com/nodejs/TSC/pull/1756) that contains the version of the changes I would like to see.
