Warble Cloud — Governance

How decisions get made in the Warble Cloud open community.

Roles

Members

Anyone who participates — asks questions in Office Hours, opens issues, comments on PRs, joins Discord. No formal application. Just show up.

Contributors

Members who have landed at least one merged PR or issue resolution across any warble-tech repo. Contributors get the Contributor role on Discord.

Maintainers

Contributors who have demonstrated sustained, high-quality contributions in a specific area and have been nominated by an existing maintainer. Maintainers can:

Approve and merge PRs in their area
Triage issues
Drive RFCs to a decision
Vote in community-wide decisions

Current maintainers are listed in each repo’s MAINTAINERS.md.

Working Group leads

Each working group has 1–2 leads who set the cadence, agenda, and represent the WG in cross-WG decisions. Leads are nominated within the WG and confirmed by Stewards.

Stewards

A small group (3–5) responsible for the overall health of the community: dispute resolution, code-of-conduct enforcement, and final tie-breaking on contested decisions. Stewards serve 1-year terms and rotate. Initial Stewards are Warble Cloud’s founding maintainers.

Decision making

Decisions are made by lazy consensus: a proposal is accepted if no one objects within the proposal’s review window (typically 7 days for RFCs, 48 hours for routine PRs).

If consensus cannot be reached:

The proposal is escalated to the relevant Working Group.
If still unresolved, escalated to Stewards.
Stewards vote; simple majority decides. Stewards must publicly state their reasoning.

RFC process

Significant changes go through rfcs/. See rfcs/README.md for the template and lifecycle.

Adding/removing maintainers

Adding — Any maintainer can nominate a contributor. Lazy consensus among existing maintainers in the area. Confirmed in a PR to the relevant MAINTAINERS.md.
Removing — A maintainer can step down at any time by opening a PR. Removal for inactivity (>6 months) or CoC violations is a Steward decision.

Modifying governance

This document can only be changed via an RFC with explicit Steward approval.

Conflicts of interest

Maintainers and Stewards employed by the same company should not constitute a majority of any decision-making group. Steward elections will rebalance if a single employer would otherwise hold majority.