Where the protocol gets shaped.
KYE Protocol™ is governed in the open. Six working groups meet on GitHub Discussions; minutes and decisions are public; profile and endpoint changes land via a four-stage RFC process. Membership is open to anyone with operational expertise in the relevant domain — you do not need to be a partner, a customer, or a contributor today.
One per surface that needs deep domain input.
Async first, sync where necessary.
- Primary venue — GitHub Discussions on
KYE-Protocol/Discussions. Every WG has a top-level category. Threads are the default; meetings are the exception. - Sync calls — monthly per WG, 60 minutes, recorded, minutes posted. Open to any participant. Times rotated across timezones quarterly.
- Decisions — rough consensus on the discussion thread, then rubber-stamped on the next sync. Two-maintainer-approval required for spec changes.
- Working artefacts — PRs land in the public mirror under
private/specs/projection. CI must be green.
What every WG agrees up front.
Each WG operates under a published charter. The charter is intentionally short — the goal is to constrain scope, not to write process for its own sake.
- C1Scope. Which parts of the spec the WG owns. Boundaries with adjacent WGs.
- C2Decision rule. Rough consensus + two-maintainer approval. Disputes escalated to the cross-WG council.
- C3Membership. Open. Recognised participants are listed; voting members named.
- C4Conflict-of-interest. Members disclose vendor affiliations. Decisions favouring one vendor are flagged.
- C5Code of conduct. The Contributor Covenant applies. Maintainers enforce.
Four stages from idea to landing.
- RFC-1Open a discussion. File a GitHub Discussion in the relevant WG. Describe the gap, the proposed shape, the worked example. The WG decides whether to charter the work.
- RFC-2Spec PR. Once the WG has consensus, open a PR with the schema + OpenAPI op + at least one example. Patent-safety scan must pass.
- RFC-3Conformance fixture. Add at least one black-box fixture under the conformance pack. CI must pass against the fixture.
- RFC-4Sign-off. Two WG maintainers approve. Schema gets a stable
$id. Profile lands in the next minor release.
Security disclosures bypass the RFC track. See SECURITY.md.
Neutral governance at v2.0.
v1.0 governance lives in the KYE Protocol™ project. The intentional path at v2.0 is to move governance to a neutral foundation — Linux Foundation or OpenWallet Foundation are the working candidates — with a royalty-free patent grant, an unchanged trademark policy, and the existing WGs preserved as foundation working groups. The trademark policy and patent track are documented on the legal page.
Open by default.
The fastest way to engage: open a GitHub Discussion in the WG that matches your domain. The slowest way: wait for an invitation. There is no invitation; the WGs are open.