Governance

The Council & The Wall

Spruce Grove OS is steered the way it was built: out loud. A small council in the Leather Apron tradition raises every change as a question, tests it against the Gate, and only then lets it climb the Wall onto the release train. The stewards are anonymous by design — what you can audit is the work, the receipts, and the rules.

The Stewards three seats

Three stewards hold the keys — infrastructure, releases, and the roadmap. On every public surface they are seats, not names: contributions are judged by the work, and the anonymity keeps the project about the ethos rather than the people. Decisions that touch security or the Gate require all three; everything else requires two.

three seats · one standard · no names on the wall of the internet

How a decision walks

In the Leather Apron tradition, decisions start as questions and earn their way forward. Five steps, every time — including for the council's own ideas.

  1. Raise it in council.Spoken or written, in session or in the dictation ledger. Anything worth changing starts as a real question, not a solution looking for applause.
  2. Inquiry before opinion.What exists today? What is it doing for someone right now? What breaks if it changes? Understand first — the Junto rule.
  3. Prototype or proposal.A diff, a spike, a one-page plan. Small proofs beat long debates.
  4. The Gate.Tried & true · secure · honest · grove-fit · counsel sign-off. Manic, insecure, or risky does not pass. No exceptions for shiny.
  5. The Wall.Approved work queues for release with the council's marks on it — and the receipts publish like everything else.

The Gate five criteria

Every change — grown here or arriving from the upstream line — faces the same five questions. The full contract lives on the Release Observatory's Upstream Connector.

Tried & true · Secure

battle-tested or it waits
Tried & true
Battle-tested, no surprise dependencies, no rewrite masquerading as a cleanup.
Secure
No new exfiltration surface. Secrets stay in the grove. Supply chain clean and hash-pinned.

Honest · Grove-fit · Sign-off

the human half
Honest
Docs match behavior. No vanity numbers. If a count can drift, it is computed, not claimed.
Grove-fit
Passes the rename map and the compatibility contracts, or carries a written exit plan.
Sign-off
An apron-wearer says yes — out loud, on the record, with their seat on it.

The Approval Wall

No release reaches the public train without climbing the wall. Every plaque on the wall is a published release, and every plaque carries the council's marks. A release that later fails judgment is rolled back — and the rollback is published too. Honesty survives mistakes; silence doesn't.

release · unanimous
Gate surfaces

·

release · 2 of 3
features & fixes

··

hotfix · 1 of 3
ratified in 72h

The contributor path

learn → build → invite
Learn the harness
Desktop and CLI, hands-on. Build something for yourself with it first — that is the entrance exam, and it is open to everyone.
Work in the open
Fork, propose, land small things through normal review. Small proofs beat long debates here too.
Steward rotation
Contributors the council has built with are invited into review rotation, then into seats as they open. The council stays small on purpose; the rotation keeps it honest.

The Connector rule

The upstream line stays open — it is free leverage and a standing obligation to learn from what came before. But nothing auto-merges: every signal arrives wearing ⧗ awaiting counsel, and the gate is the only door. The connector is read-only public metadata — no tokens, no code, no identity ever crosses it.