Governance audit and improvement suggestions

[jaimergp]

Hello @conda/steering-council! @trallard and I have been working on this audit for some time and are now ready to publish the results of our findings.

Context

We audited the conda and conda-incubator Github organizations, with special attention to conda/governance between April and August 2025. The goals were:

• identify procedural or structural gaps in our current governance
• identify potential improvements or updates needed to the current governance to better reflect the projects/ecosystem status and the needs of our community (as our project and community evolve, our governance should follow/adjust to such changes)
• propose a plan to adress the gaps found or make our governance more robust

Important

Please see sub-issues for more details, including action items for recommendations.

Summary of findings

• The terms "conda community" and "conda organization" should be clearly defined and used accordingly
• The documentation for teams and their roles could be more explicit; e.g. not clear how to create different types of teams and with which purpose
• The project types (community, federated, archived) don't have clear processes for incubation/graduation.
• The Steering Council charter, mission, responsibilities, etc are scattered in the governance and should be consolidated in a single location
• Inconsistencies in the Code of conduct team
• Lack of leadership focused meetings (e.g. once or twice a year)

Resources

Diagram: Governance model

Diagram: Ecosystem