Clean up contribution info

- Bring links up to date
- Separate and flesh out governance
- Remove Verizon Media reference
- Clean up some language

1 files changed, 58 insertions, 0 deletions

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+<!-- Copyright Yahoo. Licensed under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE in the project root. -->
+
+# Vespa Governance
+
+Anyone is welcome to contribute to Vespa, by [creating pull requests](CONTRIBUTING.md)
+or taking part in discussions about features, e.g in [GitHub issues](https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/issues).
+
+This document defines who has authority to do what on the Vespa open source project.
+
+While a formal assignment of authority is necessary as a fallback mechanism, it is
+not the way decisions regarding Vespa are usually made, or expected to be made.
+The community sees disagreement as good as a diversity of perspectives having influence
+leads to better decisions. We seek to resolve disagreement by reaching 
+consensus based on the merit of technical arguments, with no regards to status or
+formal role. This almost always works.
+
+# Vespa roles
+
+There are two formal roles in Vespa:
+
+* __Vespa Committers__ have the right to merge pull requests into the Vespa repo.
+* __The Vespa Board__ has final authority over all decisions made on the project.
+
+# Vespa committers
+
+A __Vespa committer__ is able to merge pull requests into the Vespa repositories under
+[https://github.com/vespa-engine](https://github.com/vespa-engine), including into
+the master branch which is released to production.
+
+To become a Vespa Committer, start making PR's that are approved. When a sufficient
+trust is built through working on Vespa this way, any current Vespa Committer can nominate
+you to the Vespa board for the committer role.
+
+Every pull requests must be approved by a Vespa Committer which is different from the
+author of the request, either by clicking "approve", by making a comment indicating agreement,
+or simply merging it. As a rule, approval should happen before merge, but this is not strictly 
+required as the approver can revert.
+
+The Vespa committers are listed here:
+[https://github.com/orgs/vespa-engine/people](https://github.com/orgs/vespa-engine/people)
+
+# The Vespa board
+
+The __Vespa board__ has final authority over all decisions regarding the Vespa project,
+including 
+
+* whether to merge (or keep) a PR in the event of any dispute, 
+* who should be committers and who should be members of the board, and
+* whether to make any changes to the governance policy (this document).
+
+The board consists of 4 people, and makes decisions by majority vote.
+On a tie the leader of the board has a double vote.
+
+The board members are:
+* Jon Bratseth (bratseth) - leader
+* Kristian Aune (kkraune)
+* Kim Johansen (johans1)
+* Frode Lundgren (frodelu)