Governance
This document describes how OpenCheckpoint runs today and how its governance will change as the project grows.
Principles
Section titled “Principles”- Open: the project makes all technical decisions in public, on GitHub issues, discussions, and pull requests.
- Neutral: no single company controls the specification. Maintainers disclose their affiliations, and governance will require maintainers from multiple organizations as the project grows.
- Evidence-based: a change to the format must rest on implementation experience, examples, or measurement. Preference alone does not justify one.
- Conservative: the specification grows only when a need is demonstrated.
- Contributors are anyone who opens an issue, comments, or submits a pull request.
- Maintainers review and merge pull requests, shepherd RFCs, cut releases, and uphold the code of conduct. They are listed in MAINTAINERS.md with their affiliations.
- Specification editors are the maintainers responsible for the normative text and schema.
Every change to
spec/needs approval from an editor.
Becoming a maintainer
Section titled “Becoming a maintainer”Any maintainer may nominate a contributor with a sustained record of high-quality contributions and reviews. The maintainers decide nominations by lazy consensus (below). The project seeks maintainers from organizations not yet represented.
The other maintainers may move a maintainer who has been inactive for six months to emeritus status.
Decision-making
Section titled “Decision-making”- Lazy consensus. Maintainers make most decisions on pull requests. A pull request with approval
from a maintainer (and an editor, for
spec/) and no unresolved objection after the review period may be merged. The review period is two business days for editorial and tooling changes and seven days for normative changes. - RFCs. Normative changes follow the RFC process. An RFC is accepted when the shepherd calls for consensus and no maintainer objects within seven days.
- Voting. If the maintainers cannot reach consensus, any maintainer may call a vote. A proposal passes with a majority of maintainers. Normative changes and changes to this document need two thirds.
- Conflicts of interest. Maintainers abstain from votes where they have a conflict of interest beyond their disclosed affiliation.
While maintainers come from a single organization, normative changes also require a public comment period of at least fourteen days, announced in GitHub Discussions, so that outside reviewers can object.
Releases and versioning
Section titled “Releases and versioning”The specification follows the version policy in §5 of the specification. A release tags the specification, the schema, the fixtures, and the documentation together. Each release has a changelog entry. Maintainers never edit a published schema.
Code of conduct
Section titled “Code of conduct”All participants follow the code of conduct. Maintainers enforce it.
Changes to governance
Section titled “Changes to governance”Changes to this document are Process RFCs and need a two-thirds vote of maintainers.
Generated from GOVERNANCE.md. Edit it there.