# 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)