Inactivity Policies

As part of the normal lifecycle of a project, codebases and maintainers come and go. This document outlines a LF Decentralized Trust-wide policy for moving maintainers to emeritus status when a project’s TSC does not have an explicit policy of its own, as well as the responsibilities of the Technical Advisory Council (TAC), LF Decentralized Trust staff, and project’s TSC in this process.

Maintainer Inactivity

This policy applies to projects that do not have an explicit maintainer inactivity policy. Where a project TSC has an established a functioning policy, only that project’s policy will apply.

LF Decentralized Trust greatly appreciates the contributions of all maintainers; however, removing write privileges is in the interest of maintaining an orderly and secure project.

Activity can include code contributions, code reviews, issue reporting, or any other trackable activity attributed to a LF Decentralized Trust repositories on GitHub.

When a maintainer has not had any activity in a particular project for three months, the maintainer and the project’s TSC will receive a notification informing them of the inactivity policies. The means and manner of notification (e.g., email, GitHub mentions) will be at the discretion of the project’s TSC Chair or their designee.

When a maintainer has not had any activity in a particular project for six months, a proposal will be opened to move the maintainer from active status to emeritus status. This proposal will be initiated by a member of the project’s TSC, a member of the LF Decentralized Trust TAC, or an LF Decentralized Trust staff. All permissions to approve pull requests, commit code, and other related privileges will be removed.

The proposal will be in the form of a pull request (PR) to the relevant project repositories updating their maintainer lists. The inactive maintainer will be notified of this via an “at” @ mention in the PR. The PR will be open for at least one week to allow time for the project team and the maintainer to comment.

Inactive maintainers who express an intent to continue contributing may request a three-month extension. This request shall be made in the pull request updating their active maintainer status. Typically, only one such extension will be granted.

Maintainers who have been moved to emeritus status may return to active status once their activity within the project resumes and the current maintainers approve their reactivation.

A LF Decentralized Trust staff member will provide a report (or maintain an automated means to generate a report) of the most recent GitHub tracked actions for contributors at regular intervals to the project’s TSC. It will be the project TSC’s responsibility to act on the data.