wickra/GOVERNANCE.md

Governance

Wickra is an open-source project maintained under a single-maintainer ("BDFL") model. This document describes how decisions are made and how the project is run, so contributors know what to expect.

Roles

• Maintainer. The maintainer (see MAINTAINERS.md) is responsible for the project's direction, reviews and merges changes, cuts releases, and has final say on all technical and project decisions.
• Contributors. Anyone who proposes changes via pull requests, files issues, improves documentation, or otherwise participates. Contributors do not need any special status to take part.

Decision-making

• Day-to-day technical decisions (APIs, indicator implementations, refactors) are made by the maintainer, informed by discussion on issues and pull requests.
• Proposals are raised as GitHub issues or pull requests. Significant or breaking changes should be opened as an issue first to agree on the approach before implementation.
• The maintainer aims to act transparently: rationale for non-trivial decisions is recorded in the relevant issue, pull request, or commit message.

Contribution flow

All changes — including the maintainer's own — go through pull requests so that CI (tests, linting, static analysis) runs against them, and so the change history is reviewable. Contribution requirements are documented in CONTRIBUTING.md, including the Developer Certificate of Origin sign-off that every commit must carry.

Becoming a maintainer

The project currently has one maintainer. Maintainership may be extended to contributors who have demonstrated sustained, high-quality involvement, at the current maintainer's discretion. If the project grows to multiple maintainers, this document will be updated to describe shared decision-making.

Continuity and succession

The project is designed to survive the loss of any single individual, so that issues can be triaged, proposed changes accepted, and releases published within one week of confirmed loss of the maintainer:

• Credentials. All credentials required to operate the project — the wickra-lib GitHub organization, the publishing tokens for crates.io, PyPI and npm, and the wickra.org domain registrar — are stored in a password manager. A trusted contact (a family member) holds emergency access to that password manager and can obtain these credentials if the maintainer can no longer continue.
• Continuity actions. With that access, the trusted contact (or a delegate they appoint) can create and close issues, accept pull requests, and publish releases through the existing CI/CD workflows.
• Account recovery. The maintainer's GitHub account has recovery configured, and ownership of the wickra-lib organization can be transferred to a new maintainer.
• Legal rights. Legal rights to the project name and DNS are covered by the maintainer's estate arrangements.

Code of conduct

All participants are expected to follow the Code of Conduct.

Changes to this document

This governance model may evolve as the project grows. Changes are made via pull request and take effect once merged.