# Governance

Lightweight on purpose: a small project pretending to be the Apache
Software Foundation helps nobody. This page says who decides what, how
decisions get recorded, and how those answers change as the project
grows.

## Roles

**Maintainers** merge to `main`, cut releases, own the roadmap and the
launch-gated decisions, and are the escalation point for conduct issues
(see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md). Current maintainers: the Sustainability
Software Lab (LBL) team that builds the kit.

**Reviewers** are regular contributors invited by a maintainer after a
track record of quality reviews and merged work. Reviews from reviewers
count toward merging; maintainers still land the merge while the
project is 0.x.

**Contributors** are everyone who opens an issue, improves a doc, or
sends a pull request. CONTRIBUTING.md covers the mechanics; the short
version is: tests and `make check` green, honest claims, no fabricated
numbers.

## How decisions are made

- **Code-level decisions** happen in pull requests. Disagreements
  resolve by evidence (an ablation, a benchmark, a failing test) over
  opinion; the ablation-first house rule applies to maintainers too.
- **Architecture decisions** get an ADR in `docs/adr/` (numbered,
  short, stating context, decision, consequences). Existing ADRs are
  the format reference. A change that contradicts an ADR updates or
  supersedes the ADR in the same pull request.
- **Direction-level proposals** start as an RFC. That covers new
  subsystems, roadmap changes, and anything touching the five public
  surfaces in [VERSIONING.md](VERSIONING.md). An RFC is a GitHub
  Discussion in the "Ideas" category, titled "RFC: ...", laying out the
  problem, the proposal, and the alternatives considered. When an RFC converges, it becomes an ADR
  plus issues; when it does not, the Discussion records why, which is
  worth as much.
- **Tie-breaks**: maintainers decide, in the open, with the reasoning
  written down where the discussion happened.

## What we optimize for

Correct over clever, honest over impressive, evidence over authority.
An eval harness project that fudged its own numbers would be worse than
no project; reviewers are explicitly empowered to block anything that
publishes an unmeasured claim.

## Changing this document

Governance changes are direction-level: RFC Discussion first, then a
pull request updating this page. While the project is 0.x, expect this
page to stay short; roles get added when there are people to fill them,
not before.
