Governance

This document defines project governance for the project.

Voting

The Cortex project employs voting to ensure no single member can dominate the project. Any maintainer may cast a vote. To avoid having a single company dominate the project, at most two votes from maintainers working for the same company will count.

For formal votes, a specific statement of what is being voted on should be added to the relevant github issue or PR, and a link to that issue or PR added to the maintainers meeting agenda document.

Maintainers should indicate their yes/no vote on that issue or PR, and after a suitable period of time (minimum 2 business weeks), the votes will be tallied and the outcome noted. Maintainers who do not cast a vote, after a suitable period of time, are not included in the majority calculation.

Maintainer duties

Maintainers are required to participate in the project, by joining discussions, submitting and reviewing pull requests, answering user questions, among others.

Besides that, we have one concrete activity in which maintainers have to engage from time to time: releasing new versions of Cortex. This process ideally takes only a couple of hours, but requires coordination on different fronts. Even though the process is well documented, it is not without eventual glitches, so, each release needs a “Release shepherd”. How it works is described in the RELEASE.md file.

Changes in Maintainership

Contributors who are interested in becoming a maintainer, if performing relevant responsibilities, should discuss their interest with the existing maintainers. New maintainers must be nominated by an existing maintainer and must be elected by 2/3 majority vote.

We do not expect anyone to make a permanent commitment to be a Cortex maintainer forever. After all, circumstances change, people get new jobs, new interests, and may not be able to continue contributing to the project. At the same time, we need to keep the list of maintainers current in order to have effective governance. People may be removed from the current list of maintainers via one of the following ways:

• They can resign
• If they stop contributing to the project for a period of 6 months or more
• By a 2/3 majority vote from active maintainers

Former maintainers are recognized with an honorary Emeritus Maintainer status, and have their names permanently listed in the README as a form of gratitude for their contributions.

Approving PRs

PRs may be merged after receiving at least two positive votes. If the PR author is a maintainer, this counts as a vote.

Github Project Administration

Maintainers will be added to the collaborators list of the Cortex repository with “Write” access.

After 6 months a maintainer will be given “Admin” access to the Cortex repository.

Changes in Governance

All changes in Governance require a 2/3 majority vote.

Other Changes

Unless specified above, all other changes to the project require a 2/3 majority vote. Additionally, any maintainer may request that any change require a 2/3 majority vote.