Officially replace the title BDFL with Project Lead

Can anyone describe how a Drupal Project Lead would be different from a BDFL? It is still a lifetime appointment and carries unilateral decision-making authority as far as I can tell.

I think we should change the leadership structure to match if we're going to change the label. Otherwise we're just putting a friendlier face on what is still a BDFL in every meaningful way.

Just out of the core committer offsite this week, we discussed this in the core committer team including Dries in person as well. Dries expressed that (1) he did not use the BDFL title anywhere, he uses "project lead' and (2) that the existing responsibility structures where he is defined as a decision maker are supposed to serve more as a guideline to where to turn when a tie need to be broken, not that he would need to block all of those decisions.

So it would indeed be great to not just update the governance to change BDFL to project lead but also to reflect this in the text. Dries offered to propose changes for this. Not sure if that happens in this issue, but I think this sounds like the best to repurpose for it.

@Gábor Hojtsy, thanks for making this issue. I checked the MR and all the references to BDFL have been changed. I think that this should be committed as is (due to the age of the issue and the sensitive nature of the wording) and that the changes to for the decision making be done in a separate issue. I'll leave this for a few days to see if anyone else agrees or disagrees.

I reviewed this change and it looks good! I'm +1 on committing this. Thank you for helping with this, Gabor!

I went through the changes and the changes look fine. Also noticed that we are replacing specific mentions of Dries in the core governance with Project Lead, which seems fine.

The PACSI matrix still uses BDFL. Maybe that's fine since I'm not sure that anyone has an editable version of that.

Thanks all!

The PACSI is a good point, I just went and updated that too. I don't have the original editable but I could make it look almost like the original :D

Opened #3367191: Speed up decision making: define the project lead as an arbitrator/tie breaker instead of ultimate decision maker → for the decision making changes after landing this change here :) I think #3367191: Speed up decision making: define the project lead as an arbitrator/tie breaker instead of ultimate decision maker → would be the real big step as it would allow us to speed up making decisions and also to speed up changing our governance (and also change the PACSI likely significantly).

https://www.drupal.org/contribute/core/maintainers → still mentions BDFL multiple times, I didn't check everything else in https://www.drupal.org/governance → but I imagine other pages are similar. I think we need to re-open this or have a follow-up.

Half of #3327844: Convert governance docs to markdown, redirect d.o page to Gitlab UI as canonical version → happened, and the other half should happen eventually as well, which would remove those pages. Since we converted to Markdown, there is no direct way to copy the updated canonical versions to the d.o docs pages. That would be in the scope of #3327844: Convert governance docs to markdown, redirect d.o page to Gitlab UI as canonical version → and not here.

Glad to see that this was committed while I was on holiday. Thanks!

Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.