General Assembly
The General Assembly is a regular meeting of community members.
Meeting signups are maintained on the "Join the Community" page on https://baseline-protocol.org.
Identify high-level baseline protocol project categories
Articulate specific projects within those categories for the community to execute
Rank projects by loose consensus so that contributors can spot attractive opportunities to work on
The group meets monthly (or biweekly, as needed) and is convened by the TSC Chair. From an OASIS governance perspective, the General Assembly is considered a subcomittee of the TSC, but in practice, the General Assembly and TSC have coequal roles in the community.
Baseline Community Projects are the General Assembly's way of managing specific objectives for the baseline protocol initiative. General Assembly members commit themselves to one or more of these.
To be an General Assembly member means you are standing up -- alone or with a group of members -- to be accountable for one or more projects of the Baseline Protocol Initiative.
While others may do the development and task-work, a General Assembly member commits to articulating and prioritizing the work, identifying community members and others who can do the work, and using whatever incentive structure is available (or whatever influence one has) to help ensure the work gets done.
General Assembly Members also keep the community of project stakeholders regularly informed of status. This includes cases where milestones aren't being met or when a project should be shut down and the learning recycled into another project.
Here's a snapshot of the project roadmap in the baseline protocol's Zenhub dashboard:
Projects can be technical, strategic, or organizational. For example, a technical project would be finding a messaging system that suits the baseline specifications. An organizational project would be developing a powerful and flexible incentive structure for the baseline community. Both are managed and tracked in Zenhub as shown above.
General Assembly Members have Github write permission, which gives them the ability to add and edit Projects, Epics and Issues, and to assign (and be assigned) work to specific Contributors.
Unlike the TSC, which is fixed at eleven elected members, the size of the General Assembly is flexible. To balance openness and inclusiveness with the need to keep the team manageable and accountable, there is a single rule that determines membership: Accountability for Active Projects.
If you want to help lead an existing project or if you intend to create a new project, post the following to the #SSC-membership-requests Slack channel (or optionally contact the TSC Chair directly):
Your name, email, company/organization, github ID
A one or two-sentence description of the area around which you intend to help provide leadership
You will receive back an invitation to either a special session of the General Assembly or the next general General Assembly meeting, and you may at that time state your intention to join the team. If no one asks for a further review by the TSC, you are approved as a new member of the General Assembly and can begin working on your Project(s).
General Assembly Members will be added to the Github Org, have Read access to the main Baseline Protocol repo and Write access to the Roadmap repo.
Within 24 hours of approval as a new General Assembly Member, you will be sent an email with instructions on how to get permissions to the various tools you now have at your disposal, including:
The ability to create and edit projects, epics and issues on Zenhub (Write access to the Github repo.)
The ability to post messages to community members
Invitations to the General Assembly meetings
To prepare for a great start to your time on the General Assembly, review the existing projects and top-level epics. Then get an idea where you want to focus your attention, and if it isn't represented in the dashboard, consider adding a Project or talk with other General Assembly members about it.
Just as getting into the General Assembly is about stepping up to lead on a project, leaving the General Assembly would be a natural process of ending those projects or cycling off leading them. The General Assembly will periodically do a house-cleaning segment in the regular meeting to achieve loose consensus on whether any projects require pruning.
General Assembly Meetings have these standard agenda items:
Review of new Projects
Triage of Projects that seem to need help
Ranking of "top featured" Projects that will be promoted by community influencers
Celebrate successful Projects and clean up list
Anyone in the member community can suggest agenda items for upcoming General Assembly meetings. Contact the TSC Chair.
