# etcd Governance

## Principles

The etcd community adheres to the following principles:

- Open: etcd is open source.
- Welcoming and respectful: See [Code of Conduct].
- Transparent and accessible: Changes to the etcd code repository and CNCF related
activities (e.g. level, involvement, etc) are done in public.
- Merit: Ideas and contributions are accepted according to their technical merit for
the betterment of the project. For specific guidance on practical contribution steps
please see [contributor guide] guide.

## Roles and responsibilities
Etcd project roles along with their requirements and responsibilities are defined
in [community membership].

## Decision making process

Decisions are built on consensus between [maintainers] publicly. Proposals and ideas
can either be submitted for agreement via a GitHub issue or PR, or by sending an email
to `etcd-maintainers@googlegroups.com`.

## Conflict resolution

In general, we prefer that technical issues and maintainer membership are amicably
worked out between the persons involved. However, any technical dispute that has
reached an impasse with a subset of the community, any contributor may open a GitHub
issue or PR or send an email to `etcd-maintainers@googlegroups.com`. If the
maintainers themselves cannot decide an issue, the issue will be resolved by a
supermajority of the maintainers with a fallback on lazy consensus after three business
weeks inactive voting period and as long as two maintainers are on board.

## Changes in Governance

Changes in project governance could be initiated by opening a GitHub PR.

[community membership]: /Documentation/contributor-guide/community-membership.md
[Code of Conduct]: /code-of-conduct.md
[contributor guide]: /CONTRIBUTING.md
[maintainers]: /OWNERS