Governance

Docket is a small project with a large claim: that a receipt produced by this tool can be checked by someone who trusts neither the tool nor its authors. That claim constrains how the project is governed, because the format is worth more than the implementation.

Principles

1. The format is the artifact. Implementations are replaceable; spec/docket-receipt-1.md and its conformance vectors are what make a receipt portable. Format stability outranks feature velocity.
2. No telemetry, no accounts, no network requirement — ever. This is a constitutional constraint, not a roadmap item.
3. Money buys deliverables, not decisions. Funding can pay for a benchmark, a verifier, a release window or a support commitment. It cannot buy a format change, a roadmap veto, a "funded by" position on a verification result, or silence about a defect. Any funded deliverable is public, and a funder who asks for anything on this list is told no in a public issue rather than in email.
4. Claims stay narrow and checkable. Every security-adjacent claim in the docs must name its limits in the same breath. "Honest limits" is a feature of this project, not fine print.

Roles

role	who	responsibilities
Contributor	anyone	pull requests, issues, reviews, docs
Reviewer	contributors with a track record of merged, correct changes	may approve non-format changes
Maintainer	listed in MAINTAINERS.md	merges, releases, security response, format decisions
Format Steward	one maintainer, rotating annually	owns the spec text and the vectors; holds a veto on format changes until 1.0

How decisions are made

• Lazy consensus on ordinary changes: a pull request with one reviewer approval and no reasoned objection within 72 hours may be merged by a maintainer.
• Maintainer consensus for behaviour changes, policy fields, new findings rules and anything touching the threat model: two maintainers must approve.
• Format changes follow the process in CONTRIBUTING.md: the Format Steward plus two maintainers, normative spec text, regenerated vectors, both implementations updated in the same pull request, migration story written down.
• Constitutional matters (principles 1–4 above, and the licence) require unanimous maintainer agreement, and any change to them must be announced in a pinned discussion for at least 14 days before it takes effect.

Disagreements that cannot be resolved are recorded as an ADR in docs/adr/ — including the option that was rejected and why. A project that documents its disagreements is easier to trust than one that appears to have none.

Becoming a maintainer

Sustained, high-quality participation over a few months: reviews that catch real problems, fixes for issues you did not create, docs that reduced support load, verifiers or integrations maintained rather than contributed once. Existing maintainers nominate; the nomination is announced in Discussions for a week for comment; then a simple majority of maintainers confirms. Inactivity for six months moves you to Maintainer emeritus — you keep the title and can return.

Releases and support

• Semantic versioning for the tool; the format tag is versioned separately (docket/receipt/v1) and changes only per the format process.
• Releases are cut from main by a maintainer, tagged, built in CI, and accompanied by a CHANGELOG.md entry and a signed SHA256SUMS.
• The support commitment for any given version is stated at release time.

Funding and independence

Funding is accepted through GitHub Sponsors (and, if it ever exists, a fiscal host) under the rules in principle 3, and is spent only on the deliverables listed publicly in SPONSORS.md. When the project has more than one maintainer, incoming funds are split by a published formula rather than by negotiation in private. Until that point the maintainer's commitment is stated plainly: funding pays for maintenance time, verifiers, documentation and release engineering — it does not change what the software does or how it verifies.

Changing this document

Open a pull request. Governance changes need maintainer consensus, a 14-day comment window and an entry in CHANGELOG.md. Founders' special rights: none — that is the point.