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Governance

Who decides what, the bar a change must clear, and where this repository is hosted and headed. The processes below are org-neutral by design: they name no organization-specific process, so a hosting move is a purely infrastructure event (ADR-0002).

Decision Rights

Decision Who
Common capability specs and their changes (the store's openspec/specs/ and openspec/changes/) Store maintainers — any contributor may propose via write-back; maintainers review and merge
An experiment repository's own specs, changes, and implementation That experiment's team, alone — the store is read-only for them
Durable architectural decisions Anyone may propose; the decision lands as an ADR in adr/ through a change's adr stage
Terminology Contributors, through glossary discipline (see CONTRIBUTING.md)
Hosting and affiliation Store maintainers, with the HSF Steering Group as the endorsement body (see the hosting roadmap below)

No decision above requires membership in any particular organization: write-back works from any directory, cross-organization pull requests are ordinary GitHub workflow, and experiment teams never cede control of their own repositories (ADR-0001).

Review Bar

Every change — in the store or in an experiment repository — must clear:

  • The two merge gates. Planning artifacts are reviewed and merged to main before implementation starts; implementation is merged to main before anything is archived. See the change lifecycle.
  • A green validation gate. CI runs openspec validate over all specs and changes and fails on any invalid artifact — the test-suite interpretation for a zero-runtime specification repository (ADR-0003).
  • Single-source scenarios. Requirements carry fenced Gherkin scenarios authored once; bullets-mirroring-fences are not accepted (ADR-0003).
  • Recorded divergences. Any deliberate divergence from the intent-driven template — license choice, added CI, renamed conventions — must be recorded in the divergence manifest (maintainer.md). The Apache-2.0 license is the precedent: adopted for its explicit patent grant, recorded as a divergence from the template's MIT (ADR-0004).
  • Durable decisions as ADRs. A decision that binds future changes — topology, validation gates, licensing, hosting — graduates from a change's design notes to a repository ADR through the adr stage.
  • Glossary discipline. New terms land in glossary/ with use-when/avoid guidance, and documents use them consistently.

Hosting Roadmap

Recorded in ADR-0002:

  1. Incubation — now. The repository is incubated in the DUNE GitHub organization while internal reviews greenlight the approach and adoption evidence accumulates.
  2. Endorsement — the trigger. Endorsement by the HEP Software Foundation Steering Group, under its affiliated-projects process, is the HSF affiliation event. The checklist mapping an evaluator walks lives in hsf-affiliation.md. Affiliation is valid for five years, then reviewed.
  3. HSF-organization hosting — a separate follow-on. Moving the repository into the HSF GitHub organization is optional and mutually agreed, and is not implied by affiliation. If it happens, it is one infrastructure transfer: git remotes change, and the advisory remote: line in experiment configs is updated. The org-neutral store id hep-metadex, every store registration, and all governance text survive unchanged — which is exactly why the processes above name no organization.