GOVERNANCE

# Process for becoming a maintainer

* Express interest to the existing maintainers that you or your organization is interested in becoming a
  maintainer. Becoming a maintainer generally means that you are going to be spending substantial
  time (>25%) on Falco for the foreseeable future. You should have domain expertise and be extremely
  proficient in C++. Ultimately your goal is to become a maintainer that will represent your
  organization.
* We will expect you to start contributing increasingly complicated PRs, under the guidance
  of the existing maintainers.
* We may ask you to do some PRs from our backlog.
* As you gain experience with the code base and our standards, we will ask you to do code reviews
  for incoming PRs (i.e., all maintainers are expected to shoulder a proportional share of
  community reviews).
* After a period of approximately 2-3 months of working together and making sure we see eye to eye,
  the existing maintainers will confer and decide whether to grant maintainer status or not.
  We make no guarantees on the length of time this will take, but 2-3 months is the approximate
  goal.

## Maintainer responsibilities

* Monitor Slack (delayed response is perfectly acceptable).
* Triage GitHub issues and perform pull request reviews for other maintainers and the community.
* During GitHub issue triage, apply all applicable [labels](https://github.com/falcosecurity/falco/labels)
  to each new issue. Labels are extremely useful for future issue follow up. Which labels to apply
  is somewhat subjective so just use your best judgment.
* Make sure that ongoing PRs are moving forward at the right pace or closing them.
* Participate when called upon in the security releases. Note that although this should be a rare
  occurrence, if a serious vulnerability is found, the process may take up to several full days of
  work to implement. This reality should be taken into account when discussing time commitment
  obligations with employers.
* In general continue to be willing to spend at least 25% of ones time working on Falco (~1.25
  business days per week).

## When does a maintainer lose maintainer status

If a maintainer is no longer interested or cannot perform the maintainer duties listed above, they
should volunteer to be moved to emeritus status. In extreme cases this can also occur by a vote of
the maintainers per the voting process below.

# Conflict resolution and voting

In general, we prefer that technical issues and maintainer membership are amicably worked out
between the persons involved. If a dispute cannot be decided independently, the maintainers can be
called in to decide an issue. If the maintainers themselves cannot decide an issue, the issue will
be resolved by voting. The voting process is a simple majority in which each senior maintainer
receives two votes and each normal maintainer receives one vote.

# Adding new projects to the falcosecurity GitHub organization

New projects will be added to the falcosecurity organization via GitHub issue discussion in one of the
existing projects in the organization. Once sufficient discussion has taken place (~3-5 business
days but depending on the volume of conversation), the maintainers of *the project where the issue
was opened* (since different projects in the organization may have different maintainers) will
decide whether the new project should be added. See the section above on voting if the maintainers
cannot easily decide.