Procedures for Voting on Cypher Improvement Proposals (CIPs)

[Tobias Lindaaker]

Dear openCypher community,

As discussed during the openCypher Implementers meeting on March 7 it would be beneficial to make decisions on evolving Cypher in a more continuous way. It was agreed at the meeting to adopt a process based on asynchronous online communication (email), and to use a voting process based on the one used by Apache projects for measuring whether consensus has been reached.

I have put together some material outlining the process for evolving Cypher: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1OHMxiz9xW6rINiJcCdm28a8uNcZEtCsMPfhFSIA-XXE/edit?usp=sharing

I have tried to capture the process at a high level, as well as the values of the community that help drive this process.

Since we are all in this together, I very much welcome feedback on how to improve this material, as well as discussion on how to improve our process together.

The process is based on the Apache Voting process for measuring consensus: https://www.apache.org/foundation/voting.html

Everyone is entitled to expressing their opinion, but the binding/qualifying votes belong to representatives of a Cypher implementation. Publicly/commercially available implementations (as opposed to research implementations) are entitled to the right of veto (with the understanding that a strong negative vote from a non-qualified community member could influence a qualified member to change their vote in order to ensure the resolution of the issue).

Negative votes must be accompanied by a motivation, so that we can work together as a community to resolve such reservations.

Cheers,

Tobias