Open Core Governance
Docs » Open Core Governance » Project Governance
Raw .md

Project Governance

The ZQK open-core project is an autonomous, deterministic, and self-hosted system kernel engineered for human-agent collaboration and sovereign software lifecycle execution. This document defines the project's governance structure, decision-making framework, open-core boundaries, and maintenance liaison expectations.

1. Core Principles

  1. Kernel Sovereignty: All process data, state machines, and task cascades live in the local Knowledge Kernel (under .zqk/process/ and content-addressable storage), never in vendor-proprietary memory stores.
  2. Determinism & Cryptographic Verification: Work mutations, approvals, and releases must produce reproducible cryptographic evidence (qa_success, CAS hashes, and signed provenance).
  3. Cellular Membrane Boundaries: Mutations to kernel state are mediated exclusively through the ZQK CLI and privileged intake boundaries. Raw disk tampering of process files is strictly forbidden.
  4. Autonomous Anti-Idleness: Systems and autonomous TPM loops operate under continuous milestone progression without artificial halt states.

2. Decision-Making & Technical Steering

The project is stewarded by the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), comprised of active project maintainers and autonomous TPM liaisons.

Roles & Responsibilities

  • Primary Coordinating TPM: Coordinates cross-workstream synchronization, milestone scheduling, and candidate release gating.
  • Peer Orchestrating TPMs: Manage specific technical domains (CLI taxonomy, I/O hygiene, test convergence, documentation governance) and drive autonomous backlog convergence.
  • Maintainers & Code Craftsmen: Own package architectures, code reviews, security boundaries, and patch integration.
  • Quality Assurance & Verification Sentinels: Audit test matrices, Definition of Done criteria, and cryptographic evidence chains.

Consensus & Escalation

  1. Lazy Consensus: Routine improvements, documentation fixes, and criteria promotions operate on lazy consensus. Absence of objections within 24 hours constitutes acceptance.
  2. Technical Disputes: In the event of competing architectural proposals, decisions are resolved by majority vote among the active maintainers and lead TPMs.
  3. Security & Break-Glass: Urgent security patches and vulnerability mitigations follow the fast-track disclosure and remediation protocol documented in SECURITY.md.

3. Open-Core Boundary & Licensing

  • Canonical Open-Core Foundation: ZQK Core is the canonical open-source system kernel. It provides the full offline-first runtime, content-addressable storage (CAS), task scheduler, ambient daemons, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.
  • Licensing: ZQK Core is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 (LICENSE + NOTICE). It includes the complete core CLI runtime, Knowledge Kernel, scheduler, ambient daemons, MCP bridge, and showcase suites.
  • Hermetic Architecture: Core remains hermetic, self-contained, and free of proprietary dependencies or external assumptions. All build, verification, installation, and daemon lifecycle workflows function independently out of the box.
  • Release Gate Compliance: The codebase is continuously audited by ./scripts/open-core/test-public-release-gates.sh and ./scripts/open-core/check-public-release-payload.sh to guarantee self-contained execution and zero proprietary leakage.

4. Maintenance Liaisons & Release Cadence

  • Candidate Verification: Every release candidate must pass ./scripts/open-core/test-public-release-gates.sh and achieve a clean, zero-warning report from ./bin/zqk system check.
  • Release Versioning: Follows Semantic Versioning (vMAJOR.MINOR.PATCH).
  • Triage Cadence: Issues and incoming PRs are reviewed continuously by community liaisons. Contributors can inspect current backlog priorities at any time via ./bin/zqk workflow whats-next.