no they do not.. It's very clear where the power is when you open up an issue on the projects gitlab to report a bug or something that isn't working correctly and you receive a snarky response from somebody who's representing the gnome foundation project.
If somebody has said something that is outright rude and condescending to you, that would probably be a code of conduct violation, and the foundation would probably want to hear about it.
As a simple example gnome-characters is way behind on Unicode. Luckily there is a script to import the data dump, however it also should have some code updates to support things like skin tone. However different parts have been done with no maintainer response. It isn't clear where one can go to try to find a new maintainer or at least someone who can help manage changes for now until a new maintainer can be trusted.
And it comes back to the question, what is the GNOME project if it is mostly a bunch of self-governed individual projects. Is GNOME just hosting infrastructure to make these projects possible? It is clear that it is more than just that.
So I guess this grass-roots power structure is nice when everything is going well. But maybe a clear "executive" structure would be helpful for herding the individual projects from time to time.
I'm specifically curious how with such a structure a thing like Gnome Unity could have happened? Was this the case with 'a developer' (Canonical) didn't follow the guidance of the Gnome Foundation/Design team, or something else?
Similarly, how about the Gnome 2 -> 3 transition? That's not one that individual developers can mix-n-match. How is the future mainline decided in these sorts of cases?
