# Governance

This is a maintainer-led open research community. Public reasoning is encouraged; access to private systems or commercial material is not required to participate.

## Decision Rights

The maintainer decides repository scope, releases, security handling, licensing, moderation, and whether a contribution crosses the public/private boundary. Decisions should cite public evidence, repository scope, safety, provenance, maintainability, or license constraints rather than status or affiliation.

## Public Decisions

Material changes to public protocols, schemas, claim boundaries, or contributor rules should be explained in an Issue, Discussion, pull request, release note, or commit message. Rejected proposals should receive a concise reason when safe to provide one.

## Recognition and Authorship

- Commits and release notes credit accepted technical and documentation contributions.
- Public experiments and extensions should retain their authors' attribution.
- Scholarly authorship follows substantial intellectual contribution and normal publication requirements; it is not promised for ordinary Issues, Discussions, testing, or documentation work.
- Participation does not imply endorsement, employment, partnership, or access to private systems.

## Moderation

Discussion may be direct and critical, but it must remain specific to an idea, claim, method, artifact, or consequence. Maintainers may lock, edit, hide, or remove spam, harassment, privacy exposure, credential leakage, customer material, de-anonymization, or operational attack instructions.

## Conflicts and Private Escalation

State relevant conflicts of interest when proposing evaluations, commercial relationships, or publication decisions. Security, privacy, conduct, and confidential partnership matters use the private routes in [.github/SECURITY.md](.github/SECURITY.md) and [.github/SUPPORT.md](.github/SUPPORT.md).

## Service Targets

- Acknowledge a useful public question within 48 hours.
- Triage a scoped Issue within five working days.
- Publish a weekly summary when external activity exists.

These are operating targets, not contractual service levels.