[Process RFC] Clarify Community Strategy Decision Process

Author: tqchen

rfcs/0102-clarify-strategy-decision-process.md

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+Authors: @tqchen
+
+- Feature Name: [Process RFC] Clarify Community Strategy Decision Process
+- Start Date: 2023-08-03
+- RFC PR: [apache/tvm-rfcs#0102](https://github.com/apache/tvm-rfcs/pull/0102)
+- GitHub Issue: [apache/tvm#0000](https://github.com/apache/tvm/issues/0000)
+
+## Summary
+
+Machine Learning Compilation (MLC) is an emerging field in fast development.
+With the tremendous help from the whole community, it’s exciting to see that TVM delivers significant needs from and to
+developers and thus has become widely popular in both academia and industry.
+
+As the community pushes for different goals that help each other, naturally, there
+are strategy decision points about overall directions and new modules adoptions.
+These decisions are not fine-grained code-level changes but are important for a
+community to be viable in the long term.
+The process of bringing those changes is less clarified to the community, and hurdles can be high.
+We have made attempts in the past to bring more verbose processes in a less successful.
+One observation is that it is hard for broader volunteer developers and community members to follow complicated processes.
+Additionally, different members can have different interpretations of how to do things,
+leading to stagnation and lack of participation from volunteer members.
+
+We are in a different world now in the case of ML/AI ecosystem, and it is critical for
+the community to be able to make collective decisions together and empower the community.
+Following the practices of existing ASF projects (e.g. hadoop), we propose to use a simple process for strategic decisions.
+
+## Proposal: Strategy Decision Process
+
+We propose the following clarification of the strategy decision process:
+It takes Lazy 2/3 majority of binding decisions to make strategic decisions in the TVM community, including:
+
+- Adoption of a guidance-level community strategy to enable new directions or overall project evolution.
+- Establishment of a new module in the project.
+- Adoption of a new codebase: When the codebase for an existing, released product is to be replaced with an alternative codebase.
+  If such a vote fails to gain approval, the existing code base will continue. This also covers the creation of new sub-projects within the project.
+
+All these decisions are made after community conversations that get captured as part of the summary.