Community governance
Get involved
Contribute to initiatives
Pick up an issue, improve documentation, or send a patch. Every repository takes pull requests, and good first issues are labelled.
Browse the repositoriesOpen issues & discussions
Report a bug, propose a feature, or ask how something is meant to work. Design decisions get made in these threads, in public.
Start a discussionShare ideas & feedback
Tell us what is missing, what is broken, or what you wish existed. Roadmaps are shaped by contributors, not by a central plan.
Email the foundationSupport the mission
The foundation is non-profit and volunteer-run, and the work is funded by the people who value it. Sponsorship pays for the unglamorous parts — infrastructure, domains, security audits, and the sustained time that carries a project from proposal to release. Any amount helps, and every project stays free and open regardless.
Sponsor on GitHubGovernance
Core Members
The Foundation is directed by a Core Membership: a body of senior technologists drawn from different disciplines and industries, who together hold responsibility for decisions affecting the Foundation as a whole. The Core Membership exists so that those decisions are made by people with the depth to judge their consequences, and from more than one tradition of practice.
Eligibility
A candidate for Core Membership shall have a minimum of ten (10) years of professional experience in technology or a directly related discipline. The Core Membership is constituted to be varied in background — engineering, research, operations, security, design, and law among them — and appointments are made with that breadth in view.
Appointment
The Core Membership is self-constituting. Its first member is the founder of the Foundation; each subsequent member is admitted by a vote of those already serving, who assess the candidate's background and experience against the eligibility requirements above. No seat is conferred by employment, sponsorship, or donation.
Responsibilities
- 01
Vote on organisation-wide decisions
Each Core Member holds one vote on matters affecting the Foundation as a whole — the adoption of proposals and specifications, the admission and retirement of projects, the allocation of Foundation funds, and any amendment to this charter.
- 02
Guide the mission
Core Members are custodians of the Foundation's mission and of the seven principles that follow from it. They are responsible for ensuring that the work the Foundation undertakes, and the work it declines, remains consistent with them.
- 03
Direct research and development
Core Members set the Foundation's research priorities, review the technical direction of its projects, and determine which lines of enquiry the Foundation commits its resources to.
- 04
Oversee legal matters
Core Members are responsible for the Foundation's legal and compliance obligations, including licensing, trademark, the terms under which the Foundation's work is published, and its standing as a non-profit body.
Contributing Members
Contribution to the Foundation is open to anyone and requires no appointment: the repositories take pull requests, issues, and discussion from any person who wishes to take part. Contributing Membership is a separate, named post for domain experts who take responsibility for the stewardship of a particular project or subject area. The post is not exclusive: a field may hold several Contributing Members, and is expected to as the work in it grows.
The post
A Contributing Member reviews contributions, triages issues, and moderates discussion within the project or domain they serve, and is expected to be consistently available to do so. The post is applied for and is granted on the basis of demonstrated expertise in the relevant domain.
Relation to the Core Membership
Contributing Members do not hold a vote on organisation-wide matters, which rest with the Core Membership. The two posts are distinct in purpose: the Core Membership decides the direction of the Foundation, while Contributing Members carry the day-to-day stewardship of the work it publishes.
Expressions of interest
The Foundation welcomes applications for either post. Write to us with an account of your background, the disciplines or projects you would take responsibility for, and which of the two you have in mind.