We do not yet have to have a detailed governance, but we should have a placeholder that shows that we are serious about doing this well. My guess is that we are passed the point of no return for the former GNU project. The document someone pointed to about the "appointment for life" of the chief gnuisance makes it clear that nothing will happen there: it that document was created *after* the 2019 events. The FSF appears to be an echo chamber for its founder rather than what we wish it were, and that is unlikely to change. I'd like to point to a couple of resources y'all might want to consider as we prepare our governance structure. One is an interview to Keith Packard (one of the authors of X and author of countless other free s/w projects, committed to both software freedom and good structures) in FLOSS Weekly: https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/622 he discusses the current matter, and also points out how x.org and freedesktop.org took example from examples of good governance. He ultimately points to the Gnome foundation as an example. (He also has cool comments on modern *technical* issues, like shared libraries and containers, that are worth being aware of and that go beyond most people's initial thinking of such things.) (If anyone is interested in the history of how the Gnome foundation developed I can forward you the emails from that time.) The other is the delightful book by Tamim Ansary, "The Invention of Yesterday" - one of those single-book world histories. He discusses constitutions, in the context of the US constitution if I remember well, and has a passage that goes something like this: Every real-world constitution has two aspects. On the one hand it's a manual for running a country; on the other it's a treaty among all interests competing for advantage at the moment the constitution is created. [...] Some constitutions are more manual; some lean more toward treaty." I like Ansary's framing of the matter. It doesn't really apply to us in any concrete sense. But it reminds us that we have a nice angle on the "treaty among all interests competing for advantage..." because our shared interest in software freedom is a massive keel that unites us, and the social contract and code of conduct are well embraced here. This allows us to craft a more straightforward "manual on how to run the GNU assembly". A while ago I sent out an email with some detailed thoughts on GNU structure, and was delighted to see the tone the discussion took - I feel that we have something good here, the kind of GNU community that we need. I liked all the disagreements-with/clarifications-of my issues as much as the agreements :-) The next step on the critical path seems to be: Make sure that we have a convincing placeholder for governance, something like drafting a list of 4 or 5 people we have asked to draft the governance structure. That way the web page can convincingly state that we are working on that. A lot of this will depend on who wants to volunteer a solid bit of time on GNU assembly leadership :-) (Note that if we become a Software Freedom Conservancy project, Conservancy will require a project leadership committee of some 3 people or more, so getting that in place will be important if we then submit a full package.) Other things can probably wait, but we might want to write a preliminary letter to Conservancy. There is an evaluation committee meeting tomorrow (then one in a month) and getting a preliminary letter in would mean that some informal conversation in the evaluation committee would put us on Conservancy's radar.