Asterisk Project Working Group Guidelines

Here are a few guidelines that I have come up with governing working groups. Some of these guidelines come from the Node project, as they have a lot of pre-existing material on doing this. I deliberately avoided comprehensively importing their structure and guidelines, but pulled from some of their more essential core principles:

  1. There is no explicit or implicit commitment that a working group’s output will actually be turned into code/patches by Digium or anybody else outside of the working group.

  2. Some working group topics might include: documentation, feature request list, benchmarking, debug-ability, bug tracker triaging and replication, migration efforts from SIP to PJSIP (and more?)

  3. They need somewhere to “work” - so a section of the asterisk.org wiki, mailing list, or public forum.

  4. Need a regular (weekly?) meeting time and “place” (an Asterisk conference call, IRC, a google hangout, etc).

  5. Need a charter of some sort. A charter would be a clearly defined mission statement determining the subject matter of the group’s efforts.

  6. Need at least three initial members.

  7. Need to follow a consensus seeking process for any decisions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus-seeking_decision-making).

  8. Membership cannot be changed (added or removed) without unanimous consensus of the members of the group.

  9. In order to create one, talk to unknown user and he can see about getting infrastructure (mailing list, wiki, git access) setup.

  10. Any working group must include at least one person from the Asterisk development team.

Please refer any questions about the guidelines to the asterisk-dev mailing list. Before petitioning to create a working group, try to ensure that you have met all the conditions listed above.