Governance

GRP at v0.1 follows a steward + open-proposal model. The steward (Malacan, Inc.) drafts and maintains the spec; protocol-affecting changes go through public review.

Roles

• Steward (Malacan, Inc.) — drafts the spec, maintains the open protocol tooling, and operates GRP Server Cloud, a hosted GRP operator. The steward holds no protocol privilege: any operator implements the same public spec and passes the same open conformance suite, and every host’s receipts are standalone-verifiable. Neutral governance (a foundation or standards home) is an explicit, pre-committed revisit once multiple serious independent implementations exist.
• Implementers — anyone running a conforming room. Implementers are equal: any conforming server is a valid GRP room.
• Contributors — anyone proposing changes (by email today; GitHub Discussions and PRs when the repository opens with the beta).

Change process at v0.1

Until the SEP (specification enhancement proposal) process lands at v0.2:

1. Raise the proposal — email ops@grp.app today; a GitHub Discussion once the repository opens with the beta.
2. Discussion phase — minimum 14 days for substantive proposals; longer for breaking changes.
3. Implementation + conformance — the proposal must come with a working implementation and pass the conformance suite (the adversarial sim suite when it lands).
4. Publish — accepted proposals ship in the next dated spec version.

The specification changelog is the running public record of accepted changes. Once external contributors begin proposing changes, we’ll formalize the SEP process.

What “protocol-affecting” means

A change is protocol-affecting if it:

• Adds, removes, or changes a normative requirement
• Changes the canonical scope-evaluation algorithm
• Changes the receipt format in ways that invalidate prior receipts
• Adds or removes a mandatory transport
• Changes a mechanism’s deterministic behavior

Editorial corrections (clarifying prose, fixing typos, restructuring sections without changing requirements) are NOT protocol-affecting and ship in editorial revisions.

v0.2 governance additions

At v0.2, governance gains:

• SEP index — formal change-proposal documents.
• Working Groups — for areas that warrant ongoing focus (mechanism design, conformance testing, registry).
• Implementer council — multi-operator advisory on protocol direction once a second large operator emerges.

These don’t make sense at v0.1; we’ll add them as the ecosystem grows.