Yes, we know, the agora is an Athenian thing, but metaphors are meant to be broken, right?
This is the place where we make organization-wide decisions. The Spartanz organization has no leader nor hierarchy, therefore everything must be decided collectively.
The present repository is used for that very purpose. Every decision we make is materialized as a change of this repository's content (ie. a pull request) and consequently, at every point in time, the content of this repository's master branch constitutes the "law" that rules our organization.
All [active members](TODO: definition of membership) of the organization are equal and everyone is equally entitled to propose changes in the way the organization works. In all circumstances, change is achieved using a mix of issues and pull-requests to the present repository.
- Issues are used to spawn a formal discussion about a potential change and usually take the form of an open question, like "what license should we use?". It is fine to first discuss things on informal channels (eg. gitter), to make sure the subject is of interest to the organization, but only the matters discussed in an issue on this repository will be considered as official.
- Pull-requests are used to propose a concrete change in the organization and should ideally answer a question asked by a corresponding issue (as mentioned above). For example to settle the question "what license should we use?", someone can make a pull-request that adds the text "every project must use the XYZ license" to the relevant file in this repository. Discussion is still open within such pull-request, but should ideally focus only on the details of the proposed decision (because ideally, broader concerns have already been discussed in the corresponding issue).
Once a pull-request has been approved by a [quorum of voting-members](TODO: define voting membership and quorum), it is merged and the proposed change becomes immediately effective.
The decisison-making process described above applies to all communication channels and organization-wide repositories. Each individual project repository is managed independently by the project's team. Each team may have its own internal organization, most of the time involving one or two leaders, and its own way of making decisions. Nevertheless, every team is greatly encouraged to adopt a decision-making process as collective as possible.
In any case, the rules governing individual and collective behavior, ie. the [CoC](TODO: link to CoC) and the deescalation and conflict resolution mechanisms described here apply to all communication channels, in every project, regardless of its internal organization.