Governance

Status: Bootstrap governance for the design/early-implementation phase. Deliberately lightweight; revisited when the project has multiple active maintainers and shipped releases.

Principles

1. Technical decisions are written decisions. Architecture changes go through ADRs (docs/architecture/decisions.md); scope changes through ROADMAP.md; unresolved matters live in open questions — not in chat history.
2. Security conservatism wins ties. Where consensus fails on a security-relevant choice, the more restrictive option ships (mirroring the framework's own deny-by-default stance).
3. Independence. The project is not affiliated with the oRPC maintainers. If they ever wish to adopt it upstream, maintainers commit to good-faith transfer discussions (ADR-011).

Roles

• Maintainers — merge rights, release rights, ADR acceptance, security-report handling. Initially the founding maintainer; expanded by unanimous maintainer agreement based on sustained, high-quality contribution.
• Contributors — anyone with a merged PR or accepted design input. Named in release notes.
• Security reviewers — contributors invited to pre-release review of security-relevant changes (SI-tagged tests, pipeline changes, adapter trust boundaries).

Decision process

Decision	Process
Bug fixes, docs fixes	One maintainer approval
Public API addition	PR + reference-doc update; two maintainer approvals once ≥2 maintainers exist
Architecture/lifecycle/security-semantics change	ADR PR (status Proposed), ≥1 week open for comment, maintainer consensus → Accepted
Scope tier change (roadmap)	Maintainer consensus recorded in the ROADMAP PR
Release	Per release process; any maintainer may veto with a stated security reason

Consensus = no maintainer objection after explicit sign-off request. Sustained disagreement among maintainers resolves by majority; the minority position is recorded in the ADR's alternatives.

Conduct and moderation

The Code of Conduct applies to all project spaces. Maintainers enforce it; conflicts of interest (a maintainer is party to a report) recuse.

Changing this document

PR + all-maintainer approval + 1 week comment period.