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Apicurio Registry Governance

Apicurio Registry is a CNCF Sandbox project.

This document describes the governance structure for the Apicurio Registry project, including roles, decision-making processes, and how we ensure vendor-neutral stewardship.

Principles

  • Open: All project activity happens in public (GitHub issues, PRs, mailing lists, community calls).
  • Welcoming: We follow the CNCF Code of Conduct and actively encourage participation from anyone.
  • Transparent: Decisions are made in the open and documented. Non-trivial changes go through public pull requests with review.
  • Vendor-neutral: No single company controls the project's direction. Governance decisions are made by the maintainer body, not by any individual organization.

Roles

Contributor

Anyone who contributes to the project (code, documentation, bug reports, reviews, community support). No formal nomination is needed.

Responsibilities:

Reviewer

A contributor who has demonstrated consistent, quality contributions in a specific area of the project and has been granted review permissions.

Responsibilities:

  • Review pull requests in their area of expertise
  • Provide timely, constructive feedback
  • Help contributors improve their submissions

How to become a reviewer:

  • Demonstrate sustained contributions over at least 3 months
  • Nominated by a maintainer, approved by lazy consensus among maintainers

Maintainer

Maintainers are the core decision-makers for the project. They have write access to project repositories and are responsible for the project's overall health and direction.

Responsibilities:

  • Set project direction and priorities
  • Review and merge pull requests
  • Participate in release management
  • Mentor reviewers and contributors
  • Respond to security reports
  • Represent the project in CNCF and community forums

How to become a maintainer:

  • Serve as a reviewer for at least 6 months
  • Demonstrate deep understanding of the codebase and project goals
  • Nominated by an existing maintainer
  • Approved by supermajority (2/3) vote of current maintainers

Removal / Emeritus: A maintainer may step down voluntarily at any time by notifying the other maintainers. A maintainer who has been inactive for 12 months may be moved to emeritus status by a majority vote of the remaining active maintainers. Emeritus maintainers are recognized for their past contributions but do not have voting rights or write access. Emeritus maintainers can regain active status through the standard nomination process.

Project Lead

The project lead is a maintainer elected by the maintainer body to serve as the primary point of contact for the CNCF and to facilitate governance processes. The project lead does not have special decision-making authority beyond that of any other maintainer.

Term: 1 year, renewable by maintainer vote.

Current Maintainers

Name GitHub Affiliation
Eric Wittmann @EricWittmann Red Hat
Jakub Senko @jsenko Red Hat
Carles Arnal @carlesarnal Red Hat
Andrea Peruffo @andreaTP Red Hat

We actively encourage maintainer nominations from other organizations. Contributor diversity is a project health goal — see ADOPTERS.md for organizations using Apicurio Registry.

Decision Making

Lazy Consensus

Most decisions are made through lazy consensus on pull requests and issues. A proposal is considered accepted if:

  • It has been open for at least 72 hours (or 1 week for significant changes)
  • At least one maintainer has approved it
  • No maintainer has objected

Voting

For decisions that cannot be resolved by lazy consensus, a formal vote is held:

  • Each maintainer gets one vote, regardless of organizational affiliation
  • Simple majority wins for routine decisions
  • Supermajority (2/3) is required for:
    • Adding or removing maintainers
    • Changes to governance
    • Major architectural decisions
    • Licensing changes
  • Votes are held on the project mailing list or in a GitHub issue and remain open for at least 1 week

Vendor Neutrality

To ensure no single organization controls the project:

  • All maintainers vote as individuals, not as representatives of their employers
  • Roadmap and feature prioritization decisions are made by the maintainer body as a whole
  • No organization can veto a decision approved by the maintainer body
  • We actively work to grow the maintainer base across organizations

Subprojects

The Apicurio Registry project includes several subprojects, each with their own area of responsibility:

Subproject Repository / Path Area
Core Server app/, common/, storage/ API server, storage backends
User Interface ui/ React-based web UI
Kubernetes Operator operator/ Operator for K8s deployment
Java SDK java-sdk/ Java client library
Go SDK go-sdk/ Go client library
Python SDK python-sdk/ Python client library
TypeScript SDK typescript-sdk/ TypeScript client library
Serializers/Deserializers serdes/ Kafka, NATS, Pulsar serdes
CLI cli/ Command-line interface
MCP Server mcp/ Model Context Protocol server

Subprojects follow the same governance as the main project. As the contributor base grows, subprojects may elect their own leads from among the maintainers.

Conflict Resolution

If a conflict cannot be resolved within the maintainer body, it may be escalated to:

  1. The project lead for mediation
  2. The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) as a last resort

Changes to Governance

Changes to this document require a pull request reviewed and approved by supermajority (2/3) of the maintainer body. The PR must remain open for at least 2 weeks to allow community feedback.

Code of Conduct

This project follows the CNCF Code of Conduct. See that document for reporting procedures and enforcement details.