☁️♮🏛Cloud Native Computing Foundation Policy Repo
September 17, 2026 · View on GitHub
This repo contains several documents related to the operation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Governance
- The charter under which CNCF operates
- Maintainer election policy for the maintainer-elected TOC member and the two maintainers on the governing board
- The membership agreement
- The Code of Conduct which has been translated into multiple languages
Project Guidance
- Copyright notice recommendations
- Website guidelines for mentioning companies while maintaining neutrality
- Allowlist License Policy for which licenses are acceptable in upstream dependencies without requiring an explicit vote of the governing board
Community recommendations
- CNCF Blog Guidelines outlining who can submit, suggested topics, and how to submit.
- A style guide with recommendations for cloud native terminology
- A translation guide for the Chinese equivalent of cloud native phrases
Other content
A lot of project, TAG, and TOC-related content is in the TOC repo. cncf.io has information on all programs offered publicly by CNCF.
Project maintainers
CNCF project maintainers are recorded in two files:
project-maintainers-.project.csv— the primary list. It is generated automatically for projects that manage their maintainers in their own.projectrepo. To change these maintainers, updatemaintainers.yamlin the project's.projectrepo; the change is picked up by automation. Do not editproject-maintainers-.project.csvdirectly — any manual edits are overwritten.project-maintainers.csv— a legacy list for the projects not yet onboarded to the.projectprocess. An existing maintainer of one of these projects can update it by Pull Request, and should also email cncf-maintainer-changes@cncf.io (or raise a service desk ticket) so the project's CNCF-run maintainer mailing list is updated to match.
Access to the CNCF Service Desk and project maintainer mailing lists is controlled by the link between a maintainer's GitHub handle and their LFID, which can be updated at openprofile.dev. The name and affiliation shown for a maintainer are also taken from their LFID.
Questions about maintainer records can be sent to cncf-maintainer-changes@cncf.io.
How to request changes
You are welcome to file non-technical issues related to CNCF on this repo.