Skip to content

GOVERNANCE.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
88 lines (53 loc) · 4.61 KB

GOVERNANCE.md

File metadata and controls

88 lines (53 loc) · 4.61 KB

Governance

This document describes how decisions are made in the agentmemory project.

The model here is a near-copy of the Linux Foundation Minimum Viable Governance (MVG) pattern, scoped to the project's current single-maintainer reality with a concrete plan to diversify maintainership over the next two release cycles.

Mission

Ship a persistent, local-first memory runtime for AI coding agents that:

  • Requires zero external databases.
  • Runs under any MCP-compatible client.
  • Stays compatible with the open Model Context Protocol.
  • Keeps every user's data on the user's machine by default.

Roles

Users

Anyone who runs agentmemory. No process obligation beyond the license. Feedback via GitHub issues and discussions is the input channel.

Contributors

Anyone who opens an issue, comments on an issue, opens a pull request, or otherwise helps the project. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the how-to.

Maintainers

A Maintainer has commit access to the repository, responsibility for reviewing PRs, and a vote on project-level decisions. The current list is tracked in MAINTAINERS.md.

A Maintainer is expected to:

  • Respond to PRs they are review-owner for within a reasonable window (goal: 3 working days for first comment).
  • Uphold the CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.
  • Avoid merging their own non-trivial PRs without a second reviewer once the maintainer count is greater than one.
  • Disclose conflicts of interest (employer, paid relationships to users).

Maintainer acceptance process

A Contributor becomes a Maintainer by:

  1. Sustained, high-signal contributions over the prior 6 months (multiple merged PRs across more than one subsystem, plus review comments on others' PRs).
  2. A Maintainer nominates the Contributor in a public PR editing MAINTAINERS.md.
  3. The PR stays open for 7 calendar days to collect objections.
  4. If no standing objection from an existing Maintainer, the PR merges and the new Maintainer is added.

A Maintainer steps down by opening a PR that moves their entry to the Emeritus section. This is always accepted.

Decision-making

Default: lazy consensus on PRs

Most decisions happen inside pull requests. A PR merges when any Maintainer approves it and no other Maintainer blocks it. Silence is assent after 72 hours of no objection.

Non-PR decisions

Anything that is not a normal code change — charter changes, governance edits, maintainer additions/removals, project scope, breaking API changes, relicensing — happens in a GitHub Issue labeled governance with a proposal in the first comment.

  • Minor scope decisions: rough consensus in the issue thread, captured by a Maintainer in a summary comment.
  • Formal votes: Maintainers react +1 / -1 / 0 to the summary comment. Simple majority of Maintainers with a minimum of two distinct voters carries. If only one Maintainer exists, a 7-day public comment window substitutes for a vote.

Breaking changes

A breaking change to the REST / MCP surface requires:

  1. A tracking issue labeled breaking opened at least one minor release cycle ahead of the change.
  2. A deprecation path in the codebase (warning log, feature flag, or adapter) for at least one minor release.
  3. The change landing in the CHANGELOG under a clearly marked Breaking sub-section.

Release process

Releases follow Semantic Versioning. See the release process in CONTRIBUTING.md and the automated .github/workflows/publish.yml pipeline for the mechanics.

Conflicts of interest

Maintainers employed by a company that sells a product competing with agentmemory, or by a company whose business depends on agentmemory's roadmap, should disclose that relationship in MAINTAINERS.md next to their name. Nothing prohibits such maintainership; transparency is the requirement.

Amending this document

This document changes by PR. Edits follow the Non-PR decisions path above: open a governance issue, collect feedback, then open the PR citing the issue.

Related documents