I don't understand yet how that relates to formalizing your decision structures as a group.

I'm sure NPM as a company has some form of decision hierarchy and RubyCentral does as well, but it seems like Ruby Gems doesn't (or didn't). I learned the hard way that writing this down is one of the first thing you should do in any kind of group formation process.

I get that organically grown tech projects don't have that from the start (and that they might not immediately recognize that they're a group at all), but I'd reckoned that an organization of the size of Ruby Gems, with such an importance, would have taken care of that a while ago and I think it's quite irresponsible that they didn't.