Ayo.js is about the people that help make it happen. It's a project aimed at creating a new foundation of project governance and management that brings humans and their concerns front and center.
You can pronounce it however you want: be it “ey-yo”, “I-oh”, or “Awooooo” — the Ayo.js project strives to create an environment where you can feel at home and focus on your contributions to this nice shared space that we all benefit from.
Documentation, long-term support, translations and localizations, package management, libuv, V8 and Chakra, builds/ops, testing and its infrastructure, hardware and IoT, Android, streams, community events, facilitation, moderation and education. These and more are all concerns that can be handled separately and by members who might be much better qualified for these individual tasks than a central decision body.
Ayo.js will go further than Node.js did in spreading responsibility across the project, so everyone can focus and specialize better than before. Contributors should be able to organize and manage their own subprojects in a way that is effective and efficient for their unique needs.
If governance policy is not serving the values set forth here, that governance policy should change with the required agility. Following the governance policy to the letter will not take precedence over staying true to our stated values or the well-being of our humans.
Technical discussions are difficult, especially in large communities with members with all sorts of perspectives. Contributors are bound to find themselves in situations with no clear consensus, with new concerns being brought up on a regular basis, and things that might seem insignificant in other contexts suddenly exploding.
The Ayo.js project’s perspective is that when such things happen, it often takes a toll on the well-being of the members participating, at times preventing repeated contributions or precluding new contributors outright. It also recognizes that the difference between individual choices is less important than the ability to come to an appropriate technical decision.
Projects change, evolve, and find themselves dealing with new concerns all the time. In all technical matters, Ayo.js will take into account that in the end, it is the people making, implementing, and maintaining that matter most, not the decisions themselves. It’s okay for code to be imperfect.
All sorts of corporations and other organizations around the world use and benefit from the software underlying Ayo.js, and many contributors, in fact, may be directly compensated by them for their efforts on the project. But this can often turn into such direct reliance on corporations that they can essentially seize control of a project — or struggle for power over it while individual contributors are left wondering if they can ever influence the project themselves.
Ayo.js will explore new structures and framings for corporate relationships in such a way that its individual humans, not the corporations that employ them, are ultimately still the ones determining the direction of the project. Ayo.js should be a space where independent contributors, freelancers, hobbyists, and students all feel like they hold the same footing as corporate employees at all levels of the project.