I sincerely hope that Nextcould embraces the C4 contract for community building. That would be IMHO the best way to create and grow a community that is truly open and will survive for a long time.

http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:42/C4/

Fantastic idea! We have started a public discussion about this at https://help.nextcloud.com/t/should-we-adopt-c4/113/1. You're more than welcome to join it as well :-)

This seems like a great codified set of best practices - but why the prohibition on topic branches?

The project SHALL NOT use topic branches for any reason.

This is a main tenet of git-flow, and it's hardly uncommon.

The direct explanation is at http://hintjens.com/blog:117#toc47 but you should read the whole post. Or even better the book Social Architecture.

Excellent link, and thanks, but the branching thing is hardly touched on, other than a quick small paragraph that reads like "it's too hard for people to learn".