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Corexa Governance

Purpose

This document defines how Corexa makes decisions as an open source project.

The goal is to balance speed, architectural integrity, and contributor openness while Corexa grows from a bootstrap repository into a long-lived platform.

Governance Principles

  • architectural clarity over ad hoc expansion
  • openness to contributors with explicit quality standards
  • local-first and developer-first decision making
  • transparent decision records
  • maintainers are accountable for project coherence, not just merge velocity

Roles

Maintainers

Maintainers are responsible for:

  • reviewing and merging pull requests
  • stewarding architecture and package boundaries
  • maintaining release quality
  • triaging issues and discussions
  • enforcing the Code of Conduct

Contributors

Contributors are anyone improving the project through code, docs, design, testing, discussion, or issue triage.

Review Owners

Review owners are maintainers or domain owners responsible for specific areas such as:

  • desktop app
  • runtime daemon
  • agents
  • repository intelligence
  • memory and storage
  • docs and community health

Decision Making

Day-to-day Changes

Routine fixes, docs updates, tests, and scoped improvements can proceed through normal pull request review.

Significant Changes

Open an issue or draft PR before implementation for:

  • new public APIs
  • changes to runtime contracts
  • new persistence models
  • plugin system design changes
  • security or sandbox model changes
  • major UI/UX architecture shifts

Decision Model

  • consensus is preferred
  • maintainers decide when consensus is not reached in a reasonable timeframe
  • architectural consistency and long-term maintainability outweigh short-term convenience

Proposal Lifecycle

  1. Problem statement
  2. Proposed solution
  3. Tradeoffs and alternatives
  4. Maintainer review
  5. Decision and implementation path

Release Authority

Maintainers control releases to ensure:

  • quality gates are met
  • migrations are documented
  • release notes are accurate
  • breaking changes are intentional and communicated

Ownership

Code ownership is reflected operationally through:

  • CODEOWNERS
  • review requests
  • package and subsystem expertise

Transparency

Corexa aims to keep major decisions visible through:

  • issues
  • pull requests
  • architecture documentation
  • roadmap and milestone updates

Governance Evolution

This governance model is intentionally lightweight in the early phase.

As the project matures, Corexa may introduce:

  • formal working groups
  • steering or technical advisory roles
  • proposal templates and ADR requirements
  • release and security response councils