Date: 2023/07/17 @ 3pm EDT, [universal time+date link](https://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/generic?p0=3918&iso=20230717T15&msg=NeoForged%20Steering%20Committee%20Meeting%20%231)
Where: [Discord](https://discord.neoforged.net)

# Agenda

* [x] **Review governance drafts**
*Drafts summary:*
- Three core groups: Steering Council, Maintainers team, Moderation team.
- Maintainers in charge of technical matters; Moderators in charge of community matters; Council in charge of the rest (and generally supervises the other two).
- Other teams created by Council (with approval of other two teams in certain cases), with charter delineating responsibilities and authority.
- Modification of certain docs (core governance, Code of Conduct, technical structuring) require approval of two/three core groups, depending on areas the docs fall into.
- Steering Council has permanent members (currently cpw, Curle) and elected members (none yet). Elected term is 1 year. Council has spokesperson as first among equals.
- Council may have interim members standing in for a regular member due to inactivity. Temporary members until original returns to activty. Original member can nominate their interim, and approved by rest of the council.

* [x] **Choose a third Council member**
Responsible for breaking deadlocks between the two remaining (cpw and Curle). \
Temporary appointment until governance is finalized and elections can begin.

See below answer.

* [x] **Announce an interim Council member**
Will take Curle's place on the council while she goes on a break.

The current Steering Council team will become cpw, SizableShrimp, and Orion, with Curle still being a permanent member but on leave. We will determine the specifics of which member is which between SizableShrimp and Orion at a later date, just know all council members have equal say.

* [x] **Discuss NAP 2023**
We need to plan for NAP 2023 / NAP23 - our annual discussion, in the same vein as FAP from previous years.

We will plan and announce the official date later, but we think it will be sometime in September. We will also have a longer meeting during NAP23 where we will be able to answer more questions.

* [x] **Decide where we will officially break**
Upstream has demonstrated that there is little consideration for breaking changes in the mainline, so we should think about what we're going to do. Keep trying to maintain compatibility with them, or go our own way now?

Our official stance is that we will try to maintain as much compatibility as we deem reasonable. We will review upstream changes on a case-by-case basis and either fix it to fix our standards or outright throw out bad changes that we deem not beneficial to maintain and support as a feature.

* [x] **Look at all the cool demo branding art made by the community**
Particularly good art will hopefully be able to be commissioned formally for adoption by the project. We're also looking for colour _themes_ and a cohesive art style across the various pieces.
To look at all the art, see [this thread](https://discord.com/channels/313125603924639766/1130561845099499561/1130561848199086081).

One thing we want to make clear is that we are trying to get away from the anvil motif and develop our own style. We plan to choose 1-2 artists who submitted amazing art in the thread that we personally like and want to continue developing by commissioning them to make our entire branding.

After consideration during the meeting, we have decided to contact Mr. Crayfish and Ultramega for further discussion on the style that Mr. Crayfish brought to the table and Ultramega improved upon. Congratulations!
Here are the links to [Mr. Crayfish's demo](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1129550832178843739/1130479271605981184/image.png) and [Ultramega's demo](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1129550832178843739/1130547178683781150/neoforged.png).

We want to reiterate we are so thankful to _everyone_ who submitted demo art. It was all so lovely, thank you so much! Again, you can see all the art in [this thread](https://discord.com/channels/313125603924639766/1130561845099499561/1130561848199086081) on the [Discord](https://discord.neoforged.net).

# Questions

:::warning
We won't be answering detailed technical questions at this meeting - we will be raising those with the team and reviewing for discussion at NAP 2023.
:::

::: info
To submit questions to (possibly) be answered during the meeting, see [*this Google Form link*](https://forms.gle/pJ53j3RdkP8LpTZw9).
New questions won't be accepted/added here after the meeting starts.
:::

### Branding

- [x] Is NeoForge the final name for the project? Why does this name still have Forge in it?
Yes, NeoForge is the final name for the project. This was chosen as a nice mix between the new and the old. We still want people to immediately recognize the connection to "Forge", while also emphasizing the new and freshness with "Neo", quite literally meaning new!
- [x] What are appropriate abbreviations or nicknames for NeoForge? Neo? NF? NeoF?
We prefer Neo or NeoForge, thanks!
- [x] What is NeoForge's mascot?
Foxes, squirrels, frogs?? I don't think we fully know yet! Any Minecraft animal (or squirrels!) will work :)

### Governance

- [x] How are plans to procure funding for the project going? Will NeoForged become a legal registered non-profit organization?
Part of our plan is to be a zero-sum hosting project, where we don't incur any cost in hosting by using things such as CloudFlare or partnering with other community members and projects. This would mean we don't need any funding, period! NeoForged will definitely become a legal registered non-profit organization; we will have more information later. We will definitely still take up funding from people who want to provide it to us and perhaps try to setup a distribution model among contributors to give them some pocket change for their hard work.
- [x] Will there be more public Steering Council meetings?
We will tentatively say that we want to try and do these meetings monthly or something akin to that. We want to emphasize that we don't want this to become a chore, so we will try to keep it fresh and interesting each time we do it without becoming boring and monotonous. We also have NAP23 to think about.
- [x] Is there a publicly viewable roadmap?
Nope, we don't have a roadmap yet. We are going to work on this, though! We'll let the community into this plan as we know more. As King Lemming best said, we can't have a roadmap without a road!

### External Relations

- [x] Have you been in communication with CurseForge / other partners yet?
Yep! We don't have more information than that right now. CreeperHost is currently providing the server that neoforged.net is hosted on, thanks CreeperHost!
- [x] There was talk of buying the original Forge, are discussions for that happening?
We don't _think_ there was talk of buying the original Forge.
- [x] Any possible collaboration with Sponge, if Sponge decides to move to NeoForge?
We are happy and open to working with _any_ team, not just Sponge. If they want to work with us, we are happy to start communication channels.
- [x] What will happen to the Forge Community Wiki (FCW) going forward? Will it document both projects or will it focus entirely on NF?
There are no concrete plans yet, but given it is run by Curle, who is on the Steering Council team, she knows exactly what will happen to it. It might turn into a general modding wiki, we don't know yet.
- [x] Some people believe NeoForge will further split the already-shattered modded Minecraft community. What's the NeoForged team's stance on this?
Curle and cpw decided that the best way to continue Forge and keep it running long into the future was to fork it and create NeoForge. This was not an easy decision, but it is the one we made.
- [x] Has there been any talk about how multiple Forge forks will be handled at the user level?
This question isn't very clear to us, but we don't think there will many Forge forks going forward. The core of it is that you can obviously only run one Forge at a time. We will cross these bridges as we come to them.

### Project Design and Contribution

- [x] What's the path to starting to accept outside contributors?
We will work on getting a public document up and running that people can use as a jumping-off point to get started with us. We will let you know!
- [x] Is the mere mention of coremodding still considered a threat in PRs and issues?
There will be _zero_ punishment for the mention of coremodding/Mixins/whatever in PRs going forward. If you have a proof of concept using Mixins/coremodding, please let us know and share it with us in the PR! This can make it easier for us to test your idea.
- [x] What are some issues that went unresolved that will be picked up now that Forge has been forked?
We will be comprehensively taking a close eye to everything in the NeoForge ecosystem and improving what we see fit. Some things on our mind include overhauling registries, the Gradle toolchain, and the installation process.
- [x] Is the whole Java Platform Module System (JPMS) thing imposed by modlauncher going to stay or change?
Yes, we will be keeping this going forward. We think that jumping ship to JPMS now is the best step forward to the future, as Java itself continues locking us into this system with newer JDKs. However, this isn't all bad! There are many, many things in the JPMS that we simply cannot do with the pre-module systems. There are both drawbacks and benefits, as with any solution.
- [x] Many of the project leads are well known to have difficult time commitments. The triage team also was mostly inactive for the last few months. What can be done for Neo to improve the pace of development?
The triage team inactivity was largely due to internal disagreements, which have since been resolved with the fork of NeoForge! The triage team will cease to exist and will be merged into the new general Maintainers team. cpw himself recognizes his inactivity in past years, but he also has new passion for the fresh NeoForge project. He will stay active and around as he is a Council member. Do note that we are humans and have busy real lives! We will continue to improve upon this to work in the frame of our team having their own commitments so that nothing gets stalled.
- [x] Is NeoForge's code style going to remain the same as Forge's? Are patches/the decompiled code still going to have three-space indention?
We will definitely be getting autoformatters for our codebase set up and changing the decopile/patch output to look nicer for everyone.

### NeoForge Distribution
- [x] What will be the new running stance on 3rd-party launchers auto-installing NeoForge?
Our stance is do whatever you want! If we can get our zero-sum hosting plan in action, then 3rd-party launchers installing NeoForge through our servers should be no problem at all.
- [x] Are there plans for having NeoForge builds on snapshot or pre-release Minecraft versions in the future?
We want to have snapshot builds, but there is also a lot of work that goes into these updates that we have to change to be able to more publicly share it with everyone.
- [x] Are there plans to curate a list of mirrors for the NeoForged installer to use? Forge itself uses CreeperHost's mirror, see https://files.minecraftforge.net/mirrors-2.0.json. Are y'all open to someone offering mirror services to shared the load?
We currently have no plans for an official mirrors list because we have (almost) nothing to mirror! If we can properly setup CloudFlare hosting/caching, then it will probably not even make sense to use any mirrors at all as CloudFlare will be the fastest we can possibly achieve around the globe.
- [x] Can we expect an official Kotlin language provider? Over the years, the community has maintained one; however, official support would be nice.
We want to provide closer support to language providers, but we have gotten burned (Scala) in the past which delayed this going forward. Let's say, we have plans!

### Community Engagement
- [x] Will there be a NeoForgedJam?
If there is a NeoForgedJam, it will be announced at NAP23.
- [x] If there's a NeoForgeJam, will it be possible to use Mixins in the mod submissions without getting judged harshly for it?
Yes, you can use Mixins. We might even have a criteria for most creative Mixin!

# Answered Questions
:::info
These questions have been answered ahead of time by discussion of the council and the team.
:::

Is NeoForge going to be free?
* Yes.

Will Eclipse still be a supported IDE?
* Yes! Definitely.

What's the difference between NeoForged and NeoForge?
* NeoForged is the name of the GitHub organization and the website domain (neoforged.net). This is because "NeoForge" was simply not available. Therefore, **NeoForged** is the **organization** name, while **NeoForge** is the **modding project** itself. This also means we can better distinguish the two.

Will you continue to have a private repository for updating NeoForge to newer versions of Minecraft, or will the porting procedure made public?
* Having an internal, private repository for update NeoForge is a necessity so that the team can collaboratively fix compile errors without having to rely on generating patches.

This means the entire decompiled game is stored in private Git history, which we obviously cannot share for legal reasons. However, we still have much to discuss on how this process might change in the future to be more visible to the community.

Will existing Forge modpacks (like Better Minecraft, Create: Above and Beyond, and Vault Hunters) be supported on NeoForge?
* We plan to keep compatibility with original Forge, for the time being. This means that existing modpacks on 1.20.1 should work the exact same on Neo. Going forward, we will see what compatibility looks like with new Minecraft versions. It's up to modders and modpack makers which platform they want to support.

Will older minecraft versions (mainly 1.7/1.12/1.16) receive some degree of support, or at the very least not result in a ban when asking about them?
* You can already receive user support for these versions in [the NeoForged Discord](https://discord.neoforged.net). You will not get banned for talking about legacy versions. There are still plans of continuing RetroGradle, which is an effort to get our modern toolchains working on legacy versions. Currently, 1.12.2+ can already be used on our modern toolchains.

Are there plans to try and create a cross-version API?
* No. Efforts like Bukkit already exist for this purpose. Part of the problem with cross-version APIs is that you lock yourself into design choices for years to come without even knowing what is coming in future Minecraft versions. The effort needed to design these APIs is also huge and taxing. For these reasons, we will not be making a cross-version API.

A common refrain from the old Forge team is that they don't have time to do X, but also that they don't want help with X. Will this attitude be similar?
* Asking for help for things we can't spend time on is tricky. We take pride in our work, and we need to be able to ensure that other side projects (like maintaining 1.7.10 or 1.12.2) have the same quality standards. Taking on random community members with no verification is not something we are willing to do, people have to be vetted and onboarded. Making this process easier and more open is something we are wanting to move towards.

Factorio has a really nice system for syncing client and server mods before joining. What are the thoughts on adding that kind of functionality to Forge? They do control the mod portal as part of that, but could you partner with CF/Modrinth and do this?
* While this may work for Factorio, it is not something we are planning on adding into NeoForge itself. We have no control over external mod distribution platforms, and downloading arbitrary code gets risky.

Adding mods right now requires a complete reboot of the client. Is there any future where Forge mods could act more like datapacks, being able to be added/removed on the fly?
* This is a potential future goal, but it also requires engineering to support. We may look into this.

What's the attitude towards Bukkit+Forge hybrid? Any chances of collaboration?
* There is little chance of collaboration from our side. Bukkit and its ecosystem is too invasive to put on top of (Neo)Forge, and vice versa. Attempts have been made in the past, and they always lead to issues. It's not something we are interested in putting manpower to at this time.

Are you planning on making Forge somewhat compatible with Fabric?
* Multiplatform mods are fine and we will be making sure that next-gen NeoGradle tooling will be able to support these scenarios. Using Fabric directly in NeoForge will probably not be something we consider in any reasonable timeframe. Future collaborations with Fabric developers are definitely on the cards however, we have been speaking with Fabric developers and they have offered help and insights already.

"One issue that I think Forge faced, as an open source project, is that decisions kept being made behind closed doors and in private. Whilst there is definitely an appropriate time for some decisions to be made behind closed doors when it comes to discussions relating to PRs many people found it not to be in the spirit of the open source nature of Forge to have these discussions in private. It meant decisions, and discussions, weren't held to the same level of scrutiny as perhaps should've been and left people confused and uninformed.

In the future, do you see these kind of discussions continuing behind closed doors?

Whilst I understand that as a team you may wish not to contradict eachother I don't think that really matters as no one expects an entire team to be on the same page about everything."

* We will be talking about this and how the steering council will try and avoid this kind of stalling out.

Are you going to support Bungeecord/Velocity?
* If they wish to talk to us about what they need from us, we are willing to talk to them.

Eliminate the frogs in our #squirrels chat, please?
* No

Will the McModLauncher org and ModLauncher itself remain independent of NeoForge?
* Yes. It was never intended to be part of Forge or NeoForge.

# Questions we won't be answering today

What happened with LexManos and why did you decide to kick him?
* The post from cpw on neoforged.net goes into detail. We won't be expanding further on this decision in future, other than maybe a post from Curle if/when she wishes to speak about it.