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Governance

Status: draft scaffold. This document is the home that spec/00 § Specification governance and spec/05 § The trademark gate point to for the rules they deliberately keep out of the specification. The authoritative statement of the stewardship model is the whitepaper § 7 (Stewardship Governance) and its commitments C1–C5; this file operationalizes those commitments and will be ratified by the Technical Steering Committee at the v0.1 → v1.0 transition. Specifics marked (draft) await ratification.

Roles

  • Maintainer — day-to-day stewardship: reviews, merges, namespace assignment, and routine extension registration (spec/06 § Registration process). Assigns reviewers; does not decide major-version or principle-level questions alone.
  • Technical Steering Committee (TSC) — owns major-version transitions, any deviation from the five constitutional principles, and promotion of an extension into the core (spec/06 § Promotion to core). TSC sign-off is required where spec/00 § governance says so.

C1 — neutrality via membership rebalancing (operational mechanism)

The stewardship body is structured so no single party can capture it:

  • Three-tier membership (draft) — founding stewards, implementing members, and community members, with distinct rights, so governance weight is not proportional to commercial scale alone.
  • 30%-rebalancing process (draft) — no single organization (or aligned bloc) holds more than 30% of TSC voting weight; if adoption shifts the balance past the cap, seats rebalance at the next cycle. This is the operational form of the C1 neutrality commitment.

The precise tier rights, seat counts, and rebalancing cadence are ratified by the TSC; the 30% cap and the three-tier structure are the fixed commitments from the whitepaper.

C4 — transparency mechanics

Specification changes and steward decisions are made in the open:

  • RFC process — a substantive change (a new primitive, a contract change, a major-version proposal) lands as a public RFC with a comment window before the TSC decides; the extension registry's Issue + PR flow (spec/06) is the RFC path for extensions.
  • Public decision record + webcast (draft) — TSC decisions are minuted publicly and substantive sessions are webcast / recorded, so the rationale for a decision is auditable after the fact. This is the C4 transparency commitment.

The trademark gate

Use of the RFL™ mark on packaging is gated by the regime tier (spec/05 § The trademark gate): Tier 2 (steward-verified) and Tier 3 (independently verified) conformance permit the mark; Tier 1 self-certification does not. The gate is fixed in the spec; the assignment and ownership of the mark after the Foundation donation is a governance matter resolved here, not in the spec.

Spec-change and extension-registration discipline

  • Spec changes follow CONTRIBUTING.md § Spec-change discipline.
  • Registering an extension follows spec/06 § Registration process; the practical on-ramp is docs/registering-an-extension.md.
  • Major-version transitions and principle-level deviations require Maintainer + TSC sign-off (spec/00 § governance).

Amending this document

Until the TSC is constituted, this scaffold is maintained by the Maintainer and tracks the whitepaper § 7 model. After constitution, changes to governance follow the C4 RFC process above.