Who is in charge of Postgres?

When you get involved with a new organization, you assume it is like previous organizations you have been involved with that have a hierarchical structure. It has a person or group of people in charge, who are either given their positions by the organization owners, shareholders, or elected by the organization's members. Those in charge control limited resources, like money, budgets, or property. Those not in charge work within the constraints set by those in charge, and their decision-making is limited to implementing the goals assigned to them.

Therefore, when people want to get involved with the Postgres project, they assume we have a structure similar to other organizations. They look for those in charge: "Who controls limited resources?", "How to get in a position of leadership?", and they get confused. Sometimes they focus on the core team — they must be in charge, but they aren't elected, and the list of things they manage doesn't appear to be foundational to the project.

There is a list of committers who control changes to the source code. Are they in charge, at least of the source code? While they initiate the changes, they are subject to acceptance or rejection from anyone on the hackers email list, and they must address any feedback. Sometimes new developers who represent companies ask how they can become committers because they don't understand that committing is a mechanical process and that the hackers list is the proper place to start development discussions.

And are other groups:

• Contributors
• Planet Postgres team
• Irc channel moderators
• Events organizers
• User groups organizers
• Trademark board
• Funds group
• Infrastructure team
• Security team
• Code of conduct committee

Which groups report to which other groups, and who is in charge? The answer is that the groups are distributed and operate mostly independently because they lack resource limits which require hierarchical structures. However, they must take suggestions and criticism from almost anyone in the community, and must respond to it. If a group does a consistently poor job, new members will join the team to help. Almost anyone can join any of the groups, though the last three listed groups limit membership and are more hierarchical because they manage limited resources or handle sensitive information.

Who is ultimately in charge? There is a great temptation to say it is the core team, and technically this is correct because their final listed role is, "Making difficult decisions when consensus is lacking." However, this authority is used so rarely to be almost an afterthought. Instead of thinking of the core team as the center of a vast web of control, it might be better to think of it as the core of the Earth — yes, it needs to be there for other layers be on top of, but most of the Earth's activity happens near the Earth's crust, and the Earth's core can usually be safely ignored.

So, who is in charge? You are, and everyone else in the community. You have the ability to help in almost any area, with few hindrances except for the suggestions and corrections of other community members. How do you get anything done? You give your opinion, you listen for the opinions of others, hopefully adjust your goals with these new opinions, and once no one else complains, you are good to go! Do that for 27 years, like Postgres has, and it is amazing how good the result can be.