BLUEPRINT

7 Project Governance

๐Ÿค 7. Project Governance and Open Source Strategy

ICP is an open-source project whose long-term success depends on transparent governance structures and active community participation.

Open Source Positioning

ICP is released under an open-source license, ensuring that any individual, organization, or enterprise can freely use, modify, and distribute the protocol specification and related tools.

Core open-source values:

  • Transparency: All design decisions, discussions, and change records are publicly accessible
  • Collaboration: Encouraging global developers to participate in the protocol's evolution and improvement
  • Community-Driven: The protocol's development direction is determined by community needs and consensus, not dominated by a single organization

Governance Model

The project adopts a layered governance structure:

  • Core Maintainers: Hold code merge permissions and architecture decision authority, responsible for protocol version releases and quality control
  • Contributors: Community members who submit code, documentation, or translations through Pull Requests
  • Community Members: The broader group that participates in discussions, submits Issues, uses ICP, and provides feedback

Decision Process:

  1. Major protocol changes are advanced through the RFC (Request for Comments) proposal process
  2. RFC proposals go through a public discussion period to collect community feedback
  3. Core Maintainers make final decisions based on community consensus
  4. All decisions and rationale are publicly documented

Community Participation Mechanisms

  • Contribution Guidelines: Detailed contribution processes for code, documentation, and translations (see community documentation)
  • Communication Channels: GitHub Discussions for technical discussions, Issues for problem tracking and feature requests
  • Code of Conduct: Clear community behavior standards ensuring an inclusive and respectful collaboration environment
  • Translation Contributions: Translations for 9 languages are collaboratively completed by the community, with Chinese as the source language version