Governance

Effero is currently maintained by a single person (@thrive-spectrexq). This document makes that reality explicit rather than implicit, because honest governance is the first thing a potential adopter or contributor checks.

Decision-making

All design decisions are currently made by the maintainer. For changes touching src/effero/safety/, crates/effero-safety-kernel/, or the SafetyClass enum, the bar is higher: the maintainer will document the rationale in the PR description and wait at least 48 hours for community feedback before merging.

Path to co-maintainers

A contributor may be invited as a co-maintainer after demonstrating:

1. Multiple non-trivial merged PRs — not just typo fixes, but changes that required understanding the architecture.
2. Thoughtful code review on other contributors' PRs.
3. Good judgment on safety-critical code — the ability to say "this needs more scrutiny" on PRs touching the safety layer, adapters, or skills with physical-world consequences.

There is no formal application process — the maintainer will reach out when the track record is there.

Bus factor

With one active maintainer, the bus factor is 1. If you are building on Effero and this concerns you (it should), the best mitigation is to contribute: every merged PR brings the project closer to having multiple people who understand the codebase deeply enough to maintain it.

Changes to this document

Governance changes follow the same PR process as code changes, with the same 48-hour feedback window used for safety-critical changes.