Skip to content

Governance

ASTRA is developed in the open and is intended to evolve towards a community-owned standard. This page documents who makes decisions today, how those decisions are made, and how that structure is expected to evolve. It is the companion to the RFC process, which is the mechanism through which most decisions are actually made and recorded.

Draft governance — alpha

ASTRA is in alpha. This page describes the governance model as a full-featured draft: the structure below is what the project commits to at v0.1. Until then, ASTRA is stewarded by Lightcone Research, and decisions rest with the Lightcone Research core team, with all discussion in public issues and pull requests. There is no formal voting process during alpha — the RFC acceptance bar becomes binding at v0.1.

Stewardship

ASTRA is currently stewarded by Lightcone Research, which writes most of the code and documentation today. This stewardship is a starting point, not the long-term home: as ASTRA stabilizes beyond alpha, the project will move into a community-governed structure.

Roles

Steering Council. Provides high-level technical and strategic direction, safeguards the project's principles, oversees the RFC process, and acts as final approver for RFCs. During alpha this role is held by the Lightcone Research core team; it is expected to expand at v0.1 into a dedicated council as outside contributors join, drawing on the models used by the Python Software Foundation and Project Jupyter.

Maintainers. Actively design, implement, and maintain the schema, tooling, and documentation; review and approve pull requests. Maintainer status emerges through sustained contribution rather than appointment, and may span organizations and tool ecosystems.

Contributors and community. Anyone may open an issue, propose an RFC, or submit code and documentation, provided they follow the Code of Conduct. The governance structure exists to enable progress and stewardship — not to restrict contribution. In alpha, the most valuable contributions are real-analysis attempts, adversarial schema review, and downstream tooling experiments; see the Community page.

How decisions are made

Significant or contested changes go through the RFC process. Decisions and their rationale are recorded durably as accepted (and rejected) RFCs, so the project's evolution stays auditable.

Code of Conduct

All participation in ASTRA's spaces — issues, pull requests, and discussions — is governed by the organization-wide Contributor Covenant 3.0 Code of Conduct. Conduct concerns can be raised privately with the project leads at the addresses listed there. Treat other contributors the way you would want to be treated; assume good faith; disagree with the idea, not the person.

Changing this document

Governance and process changes are themselves made by RFC. The procedural baseline was established in RFC 0001; amendments — including the composition of the Steering Council and the exact acceptance thresholds — follow the same path.