Steering Committee
The Steering Committee's purpose is to ensure the IPFS project's success.
Meetings
- Every 2 weeks
- File issues
Inaugural Setup
An important task of the Steering Committee is to support or establish democratic governance of the IPFS project by the IPFS community. However, before that can happen we need a bootstrap phase so as to define how the governance will work and to set up the infrastructure it needs. That is the first, provisional Steering Committee that is working to get itself out of power.
The provisional Steering Committee has 3 seats, all of them appointed by fiat by community leaders.
For institutional continuity, and in order to have staggered elections, two of those seats are for two-year terms (ending 2026-02-28) and the other one for a one-year term (ending 2025-02-28). If the governance system we pick has term limits for the Steering Committee, the two-year terms will count towards the term limits but the one-year term will not.
The first election for the Steering Committee will take place after one year (in early 2025). That election will replace (or reseat) the one-year term. The second election will take place the follow year for the remaining seats. At that point the Steering Committee will no longer be provisional.
Note that as this initial year unfolds the Steering Committee is likely to add more people, in which case we will update the staggered terms accordingly as well.
Responsibilities
The Steering Committee is tasked with defining, evolving, and defending the non-technical mission and values of the IPFS Project. For instance, this includes taking positions on the impact of given policies on IPFS or working with adjacent projects to strengthen a shared vision of a robust, decentralized, and democratic internet.
We are also tasked with overall strategy for the IPFS project. We are not in a position to tell IPFS teams what to do, so this isn't strategy in the corporate sense. Rather, we gather input from people in the community — never hesitate to reach out! — and pay attention to developments in the wider world and try to combine these into a clear set of objectives that we believe can drive a thriving and growing IPFS ecosystem. Our goal is for that strategy to be credible and attractive enough, and aligned enough with community hopes and needs, that people in the community will want to help make it a reality.
We design governance for key parts of the IPFS ecosystem and help others establish their own governance systems. We own and support the Code of Conduct.
For all IPFS-related working groups, the Steering Committee can serve as arbiter of last resort in case the group fails to find consensus on an issue.
Finally, we identify funding sources that could benefit the IPFS ecosystem and we apply for grants that can then be deployed to support the work of the community.
Members
Juan Benet
Michelle Lee (mosh)
Robin Berjon