Governance

Project leadership is provided by the WESTPA Core Developers, a subset of contributors who have produced substantial code contributions over extended lengths of time and who are active in reviewing issues and discussions on the user’s mailing list.

Contributors

A community member can become a contributor by interacting directly with the project in concrete ways, such as:

• proposing a change to the code via a GitHub pull request; reporting issues on our GitHub issues page;
  
• proposing a change to the documentation, wiki, or tutorials via a GitHub pull request;
• discussing the design of the library, website, or tutorials on the wiki, or in existing issues and pull requests; or
• reviewing open pull requests,

among other possibilities. Any community member can become a contributor, and all are encouraged to do so. By contributing to the project, community members can directly help to shape its future.

Contributors are encouraged to read the Developer’s Guide, adhering to the style and formatting guidelines therein.

WESTPA Core Developers

Core developers (@westpa/westpa-core-developers) are community members that have demonstrated continued commitment to the project through ongoing contributions and can be trusted to maintain WESTPA with care. Core Developers are granted commit rights (write access) to the GitHub source code repositories and are expected to adhere to the Developer’s Guide when approving pull requests for merges. New core developers can be nominated by any existing core developer. The decision to invite a new core developer is made by “lazy consensus”, meaning unanimous agreement by WESTPA maintainers.

Decision Making Process and Membership

WESTPA uses a “consensus seeking” process for making decisions. The WESTPA maintainers (@westpa/westpa-maintainers) aim to find a resolution that has no open objections among core developers. If no resolution can be found without objections, the decision is made by majority vote among the three maintainers.

Code changes and major documentation changes require agreement by two core developers and no disagreement or requested changes by a core developer on the issue or pull-request page (lazy consensus).

Code of Conduct

Everyone in the WESTPA community adheres to our Code of Conduct. A rotating subset of three WESTPA Core Developers is tasked to investigate any Code of Conduct violations that have been raised.