Governance

This page describes how Prisma Next is governed today. It is deliberately descriptive of the current reality rather than aspirational — projects with one team and a small contributor base do not benefit from formal governance theatre. Expect this to evolve as the contributor base grows; that evolution will be written down here when it happens.

Maintainer team

Prisma Next is maintained by @prisma/ORM-TS-Maintain — a single GitHub team that owns the entire codebase via a flat CODEOWNERS rule. Subsystem-level ownership rules may be introduced later as the team grows; for now, one team owns everything.

Membership in the maintainer team is at Prisma's discretion. There is no documented progression path from external contributor to maintainer at this time.

Decision-making

Decisions are reached by maintainer consensus on the relevant PR or issue thread. There is no formal "lazy consensus" 72-hour silence-equals-assent rule — concretely, a maintainer reviews and approves, and that's the merge signal. CODEOWNERS enforces that at least one approving review from the maintainer team is required to merge to main.

Architectural decisions — anything that changes the system's design, public surface, or cross-cutting behaviour — are recorded as Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) under docs/architecture docs/adrs/. ADRs are append-only and serve as the durable record of why something was done. If a decision is contentious, large, or affects how external consumers will use Prisma Next, write an ADR; if a decision is small and local, a PR description is sufficient.

Contributor provenance

Prisma Next uses the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) 1.1, not a Contributor License Agreement. Every commit on a PR must include a Signed-off-by: trailer matching the commit author. The full mechanics are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

DCO was chosen over CLA because it is the lightweight standard used by Linux, Kubernetes, and a large fraction of the modern OSS ecosystem; it lowers contribution friction without giving up the legal grounding we need.

License

Prisma Next is licensed under Apache-2.0. All publishable workspace packages declare "license": "Apache-2.0" in their package.json; this is enforced in CI. See supply-chain.md for the validation details and the Apache-2.0 §4(d) NOTICE-propagation audit.

Pre-1.0 status

Prisma Next is pre-1.0. The practical implications for contributors and consumers are described in CONTRIBUTING.md and SECURITY.md.

Code of Conduct

Participation is governed by the Code of Conduct. Reporting channels are documented there.