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The Funkwhale Collective

The Funkwhale Collective is the community-led organization behind Funkwhale and its related products. The collective is open to all and free to join.

The statutes outlined in this document outline our working practices and core principles.

The English version of this document is the reference one. The main language of the project is English because we operate mainly on the internet.

1. Purpose of the collective

The collective plans, designs, develops, promotes, and uses Funkwhale and its related products. Funkwhale software aims for interoperability to help and protect users (both artists and listeners) against industry monopols. The Funkwhale collective can works on any tools helping to reach this goals : protocols, advocacy for laws encouraging interoperability, user support, infrastructure maintaince etc. Our vision of the music ecosystem can be find on our about page.

The collective and its statutes exist to ensure a safe and healthy environment for contributors. We commit to promoting diversity within all bodies and communication platforms.

2. Commitment to diversity

The Funkwhale collective promotes and celebrates diversity in the Funkwhale community. The collective's code of conduct prohibits all forms of discrimination.

Improving diversity and accessibility are ongoing goals of the collective. The collective must consider these in all decision-making processes. Group leaders commit to diversity-enhancing processes such as:

  • Enhancing accessibility through audits of our products and tooling
  • Performing regular terminology and language audits to ensure we follow best practice
  • Performing regular design audits to ensure we follow best practice
  • Participating in workshops and training on diversity topics to improve community management

The Moderation group enforces the code of conduct in all community spaces. See 4a for information on core working groups.

3. Resource management

The Steering group is free to change the ressource management if needed.

The Center for the Cultivation of Technology handles the collective's financial assets, contracts, and domain names.

The collective's financial assets comprise funding, donations, and outgoing expenses. This charitable organization is headquartered in Berlin, Germany.

4. Collective structure

The Funkwhale Collective comprises many working groups. Working groups are a flexible way of managing participation by splitting up responsibilities. In addition to the core working groups, the collective can create community working groups to handle specific workloads.

4a. Core working groups

The core working groups are a permanent part of the Funkwhale Collective. They handle essential functions related to the running and moderation of the Funkwhale project. The core groups may be :

  • Steering group – handles setting up votes on matters that affect the whole collective. This includes large project changes, financial issues, and updates to statutes
  • Development group – handles software development and associated tooling for all Funkwhale projects. Only members of this group may commit code to the codebase
  • Moderation group – handles the moderation of the Funkwhale collective. They uphold the Funkwhale code of conduct in project spaces and establish moderation rules. This group has the right to exclude users from community spaces if they violate the code of conduct.
  • Infrastructure group – handles the commissioning and maintenance of Funkwhale's server and network infrastructure. Only members of this group may make changes to infrastructure
  • Documentation group – handles the documentation of all Funkwhale projects
  • Communications group – handles promoting Funkwhale projects and communicating news
  • Design group – handles the UI and UX design of all Funkwhale projects

Members of the collective may participate in core working group votes. Priviliged access to resources such as finances, access keys, and codebases is subject to a collective decision. All members with privilegied access should have 2FA, disk encryption and share various communication channels to avoid impersonnation.

4b. Community working groups

Community working groups are autonomous, contained groups that handle specific workloads. Members of the collective may create working groups with the approval of the Steering group.

The Steering group allocates resources to working groups to enable their work. These resources include dedicated spaces in the forum and chatrooms.

Working groups may establish their own preferred workflows, including the following:

  • Decision making processes within the working group
  • Onboarding processes for new members
  • Internal voting processes for any process or tooling changes

Working groups must present requests for funding or new tool suggestions to the Steering group. The Steering group then puts these requests to a collective decision.

4c. Steering group ("comité de direction")

The Funkwhale collective has no board. The Steering group must have a least two persons. The collective’s official representative to the French state must be part of the steering group. The members of the steering group are elected following the collective decision process. If the collective’s official representative is not active he can be replaced by a member the steering group. He must be informed and have a delay of 4 weeks to respond.

5. Membership and contributors

Contributors are persons who participates in the project by any means (traduction, discussion, code developement, moderation, design, etc)

Membership in the Funkwhale collective is free and optional. Individuals may request membership by any means but they should have read and approuved the present statutes and the code of conduct. They must be contributors first.

Membership is a requirement for participating in collective votes. It is not a requirement for contributing in the project.

6. Leaving the collective and radiation

Members may leave the collective at any time without notice. For security reasons, access to passwords, infrastructure and any critical data can be ungranted if a member is not active or identity cannot be confirmed (account hacked).

Members or contributors can be excluded of all common spaces if they don't follow the present satutes or the code of conduct.

7. Voting and decision process

The Funkwhale collective's decision process is based on sociocraty principels. Consensus is the goal, consensus cannot be blocked without clear and reasonables arguments. If consensus cannot be reached the collective can fall back to votes.

The Steering group is responsible for all project-wide decision making organisation (collective discussion, votes). He must not block decision making process by not responding to members requests. The maximum delay they have to respond is 8 weeks. After that they will have to follow the decisions made by the members on the public channels.

7a. Collective decisions

Topics such as financial planning, changes to project direction, and election to core working groups are decided by collective votes or consensus. The Steering group handles all collective decisions.

Consensus follow these rules:

  1. Discussions must be public
  2. Discussion must be done with arguments, follow the code of conduct and core principles.
  3. Arguments cannot be ignored, invalid arguments must be defined has such and the reason needs to be declared.

Collective votes follow these rules:

  1. Each vote remains open for at least 4 weeks and is announced active channels.

The Steering group may change the limits and deadlines at their discretion.

7b. Community working group decisions

Each community working group may establish its own voting and discussion processes. These processes must not violate the Funkwhale code of conduct and must consider fairness and diversity.