# Governance

[Project maintainers](https://github.com/kubevela/community/blob/main/OWNERS.md#maintainers) are responsible for activities around maintaining and updating KubeVela.
Final decisions on the project reside with the project maintainers.

Maintainers **MUST** remain active. If they are unresponsive for >6 months,
they will be automatically removed unless a [super-majority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermajority#Two-thirds_vote) of the other project maintainers agrees to extend the period to be greater than 6 months.

New maintainers can be added to the project by a [super-majority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermajority#Two-thirds_vote) vote of the existing maintainers.
A potential maintainer may be nominated by an existing maintainer.
A vote is conducted in private between the current maintainers over the course of a one week voting period.
At the end of the week, votes are counted and a pull request is made on the repo adding the new maintainer to the [CODEOWNERS](https://github.com/kubevela/kubevela/blob/master/.github/CODEOWNERS) file.

A maintainer may step down by submitting an [issue](https://github.com/kubevela/kubevela/issues/new/choose) stating their intent.

Changes to this governance document require a pull request with approval from a [super-majority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermajority#Two-thirds_vote) of the current maintainers.
