The OpenWDL project is governed by a community-driven development process wherein all sufficiently impactful decisions are made via consensus under the stewardship of the governance committee. The intention is that most most decisions will be made via community discussion and agreement and, in the rare cases that community consensus is not reached, the governance committee will vote to decide the issue.

Major issues, such as the introduction of new features to WDL, setting the project's priorities, and setting the release schedule of the language, should be introduced via an RFC. Smaller issues, such as clarifications to the existing specification that keep the spirit of previously agreed upon technical decisions, grammatical errors, and other housekeeping tasks, are not required to go through this process.

Governance committee

The current members of the governance committee are:

Name	Organization	Github
John Didion	Fulcrum Genomics	jdidion
Taylor Firman	Fred Hutch	tefirman
Jeff Gentry	Fulcrum Genomics	geoffjentry
Peter Huene	St. Jude Children's Research Hospital	peterhuene
Mike Lin	Chan Zuckerberg Initiative	mlin
Christopher Llanwarne	Broad Institute	cjllanwarne
Patrick Magee	DNAstack	patmagee
Venkat Malladi	Quest Diagnostics	vsmalladi
Clay McLeod	St. Jude Children's Research Hospital	claymcleod
Mark Schreiber	Amazon	markjschreiber
Ruben Vorderman	Leiden University Medical Center	rhpvorderman

Previous members of the governance committee include:

Name	Github
Brian O'Connor	briandoconnor
Geraldine Van der Auwera	vdauwera
Michael Franklin	illusional

Adding a new member

At the core group's discretion a new member may be added by a majority vote. This addition will be done to recognize significant contributions to the community. Contributions include such things as:

• contributing directly to the specification,
• building an execution engine or supporting tooling for WDL,
• consistent, active participation in community discussions and RFCs, and
• contributing to documentation or the website (content or blogs).

If you're interested in joining the governance committee, please join Slack and let us know in the #general channel.

Removal of a member

Generally members are removed (a) at their own request or (b) due to inactivity. Committee meetings occur monthly and, committee members are expected to attend at least one governance meeting per quarter. Committee members can be removed if they fail to attend meetings at this frequency. Exceptions are made in cases of leave. In extreme circumstances the core group can vote to remove a member.

The RFC process

Any changes submitted to the WDL specification, project priorities, or the release schedule are subject to the RFC process. Please review and familiarize yourself with the process if you would like to see changes submitted to the specification.

Contributing to the OpenWDL project

All contributors to the OpenWDL project must read and abide by the principles laid out in the CONTRIBUTING.md document. This applies to all codebases under the OpenWDL organization—not just the specification.