Governance¶

Roles¶

Contributor¶

Anyone who submits a PR, files an issue, or participates in discussion. No formal appointment required. Must follow the Code of Conduct and sign commits with DCO.

Reviewer¶

Trusted contributors with triage and review rights. Can approve PRs but cannot merge breaking spec changes without Project Lead approval.

Advancement: 3+ merged substantive PRs. Nominated by any Maintainer, confirmed by Project Lead.

Maintainer¶

Full merge rights. Responsible for reviewing PRs in their area within 7 business days. See MAINTAINERS.md.

Advancement: Active Reviewer for 60+ days, 5+ merged PRs, demonstrated judgment on spec design questions. Nominated by any Maintainer, confirmed by Project Lead.

Project Lead¶

Final decision authority on specification changes, conformance requirements, AAIF submission scope, and Maintainer appointments. Currently: Imran Siddique (OPAQUE Systems).

Succession: If the Project Lead is unavailable for 30+ days without notice, active Maintainers vote to appoint an interim lead.

Decision-making¶

Editorial changes (typos, broken links, clarifications that do not affect normative requirements): Maintainer review + merge.

Non-breaking spec changes (new optional fields, new OPTIONAL conformance behavior, informative additions): open issue, 5-day comment period, Maintainer review, merge.

Breaking spec changes (backward-incompatible field changes, algorithm additions to the required set, conformance level redefinition): open issue, 14-day comment period, no unresolved objections from Maintainers, Project Lead sign-off.

Wire format changes: treated as breaking regardless of backward-compatibility argument.

Voting: If consensus cannot be reached, Maintainers vote. Simple majority for non-breaking changes; two-thirds for breaking changes. Project Lead has tie-breaking vote.

Conflict of interest¶

Maintainers must disclose commercial interest in a proposal before participating in its review. Disclosed conflicts do not disqualify a Maintainer from voting but must be on record in the PR or issue.

Vendor annexes¶

Vendor-co-authored platform-mapping annexes (§4.4 of the spec) are informative. They are reviewed by the vendor author and one TRACE Maintainer. Annexes do not require the full spec-change process.

Foundation transition¶

TRACE is targeting co-hosting under CoSAI (technical workstream) and the Linux Foundation entity hosting MCP (spec, IP, trademark, conformance mark). On acceptance, governance transitions to a Technical Steering Committee (TSC) as defined in CHARTER.md. Until then, this document is the governance authority.

Amendments¶

Amendments to this document require a PR, 14-day comment period, and Project Lead approval.