So, I strongly suspect that our choice of model will come down to whether we can agree on a project leader, or agree on a way to chose one. The obvious candidates would I guess be in this list:
git shortlog -ns --since "5 years ago" | head -5
1789 Pauli Virtanen 1528 Ralf Gommers 770 Evgeni Burovski 604 Alex Griffing 402 Warren Weckesser
I have the impression that you (Ralf) and Pauli have also been the most active in reviewing and merging pull requests over that time.
As far as I'm concerned, I always considered these two individuals as project leads.
I think we should consider the numpy governance model, only if there are none of you who want to be leader.
Agreed --- it's better to have at each point in time a person with deciding vote or veto. Or two persons. And for a really low-probability case where they two cannot agree, they together designate a third one. (Not sure we need to worry about that possibility though.) If we want to be fancy and can't find a better alternative, we can consider a EU presidency model where the deciding vote position is rotating among the dev team on a time basis.