Most Wild HQ decisions do not need a meeting, committee, or vote. The process grows with the cost of being wrong.
The person carrying a small, reversible change normally decides how to implement it after giving affected people a fair chance to point out a problem. Authority comes from responsibility for the work, not from title or who spoke first.
Use the smallest decision process that fits
Routine and reversible
Examples include implementation details, copy corrections, narrow refactors, and experiments that are easy to remove.
Put the work on a task, explain any surprising choice in the pull request, listen to relevant objections, and proceed. Review is part of the decision.
Shared or difficult to reverse
Examples include changing a public contract, collecting new data, removing a capability, adopting a recurring cost, introducing operational risk, or choosing an architecture other work will inherit.
Write a proposal in Wildbase Work and share it in Discord. Leave it open for at least 72 hours, and longer when the consequence is broad or the timing would exclude people. A declared no-objection window may let the named decision owner proceed, but silence is never recorded as agreement or counted as a vote.
The person responsible for carrying the decision summarises the discussion and records the outcome. They do not get to erase disagreement from the record.
Foundational or community-owned
Examples include changing governance, compromising an instinct, materially changing community rights, introducing advertising or data sale, shutting down a product without a durable path, or a disagreement serious enough to stop the team.
These decisions need a formal vote. A private conversation, donor preference, founder instruction, or maintainer title cannot substitute for it.
Write a useful proposal
A proposal should answer:
- What problem needs a decision?
- Who or what is affected?
- What constraints cannot be ignored?
- Which options received serious consideration?
- What does the proposer recommend, and why?
- Is the choice reversible? What would reversal cost?
- What information is uncertain?
- Who will carry the result?
- When does discussion close, and what happens next?
Use plain options. Do not create a false choice where one option is humiliating, impossible, or deliberately vague.
Private personal, customer, legal, or security material may be summarised or withheld. Record why detail is private without publishing the detail itself.
Disagreement is work
An objection should name the likely harm, missing constraint, or broken principle. When practical, suggest a safer option or say what evidence would resolve the concern.
“I prefer something else” deserves consideration but is not an unlimited veto. A concrete safety, security, privacy, legal, or irreversible-data-loss concern stops the affected action until it is understood.
The decision owner should:
- restate the disagreement fairly;
- separate facts, predictions, and preferences;
- look for a smaller or reversible step;
- record the trade-off; and
- escalate to a formal vote when the disagreement is foundational or cannot be carried safely.
Coordinators facilitate this work. They do not manufacture consensus or win ties by rank.
Urgent protective action can happen before the full process when delay would worsen harm. Keep it narrow, record what was done, and review it afterwards. An emergency mitigation does not silently become permanent policy.
Decisions leave a trail
The durable record belongs on the relevant Wildbase Work task or proposal. It includes the question, decision, date, responsible volunteer, material objections, and expected follow-up. Link the resulting pull requests, documentation, and vote.
If a decision began in Discord or a call, copy the useful reasoning out. People should not need private access or perfect chat archaeology to understand why the product changed.
We can change our minds
A decision stands until it is changed; it does not become sacred. Reopen it when there is material new evidence, changed conditions, an implementation consequence the original record missed, or a review date arrives.
An unchanged proposal can be closed with a link to the earlier reasoning. There is no ritual one-year wait and no reward for exhausting volunteers with the same argument.