Create a vision document for each major initiative and submit it to governance review

Since much of the discussion around governance so far has focused on creating processes for conflict resolution (i.e. putting out fires), I thought it might be useful to create a separate issue for the other use of governance, which is to validate direction and consensus. Which is not to say that the conflict resolution work isn't important, but there's also a possibility for using governance to reduce the likelihood that certain kinds of fires break out.

One great tool, which I think would fit very well in an open source community, is a Vision document, similar to what the TOGAF framework specifies for the start of an enterprise architecture development cycle. I could see a real value for completing one for each of the major initiatives in a new Drupal release cycle.

Basically a vision is a lightweight document that contains several key elements:

• A brief summary of the drivers for the initiative.
• A list of all stakeholder groups and their concerns. Just putting these in writing, by itself, can be a very powerful tool.
• A very high level description of the current state.
• A very high level description of the desired future state.

The role of the governance body is to simply review and validate the vision. Is this why we're doing this? Are these really all the stakeholders and their concerns? Does this really describe where we are now and where we want to be?

This doesn't change anything else about the way the initiatives are lead. But it should strengthen the position of the leaders in the community because down the road, if someone challenges the approach, they can show that the direction (at least at a high level) was reviewed and endorsed by a representative sampling of the stakeholders.