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Agent OS
AOS-GOV-002 Normative foundation

Contribution and Community Model

Contribution and Community Model: scope, decisions, requirements, evidence, risks, and traceability for the Agent OS programme.

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Contribution and Community Model

This document defines how decisions, contributions, funding, security reports, partnerships, and public claims are governed.

Table of Contents

Purpose and Scope

Area: Governance.

This document defines how decisions, contributions, funding, security reports, partnerships, and public claims are governed.

This document owns the semantics implied by Contribution and Community Model. It does not assert that every described subsystem already exists. It defines the target model, constraints, evidence needed to trust an implementation, and the boundary with adjacent documents.

Normative Position

  1. Publish ownership, decision, review, conflict-of-interest, contribution, security disclosure, licensing, and evidence policies before broad recruitment.
  2. Use scoped bounties for reproducible outputs, not vague subsystem completion.
  3. Contact vendors, researchers, counsel, labs, communities, standards bodies and potential maintainers with precise asks.

Operating Model

The operating model is contract-first and evidence-driven. A component declares its authority, resources, lifecycle, error model, cancellation and timeout behavior, observability, version, and compatibility promise. Backends are replaceable only when the same conformance suite passes and no forbidden platform type leaks into portable layers.

Implementation proceeds through a reference model or mock, deterministic QEMU evidence where relevant, documentation-first physical hardware, and quality-hardware evidence. Pixel 9 adapters remain quarantined according to ADR-0004.

Requirements

  • R01. Publish ownership, decision, review, conflict-of-interest, contribution, security disclosure, licensing, and evidence policies before broad recruitment.
  • R02. Use scoped bounties for reproducible outputs, not vague subsystem completion.
  • R03. Contact vendors, researchers, counsel, labs, communities, standards bodies and potential maintainers with precise asks.
  • R04. Specify normal, partial, denied, timeout, cancellation, restart, upgrade, and permanent-failure behavior.
  • R05. Expose structured diagnostics without leaking secrets or vendor-specific implementation details.
  • R06. Link material unknowns to a claim and, when testable, an experiment with an owner and gate.
  • R07. Update affected documentation and task data when evidence changes the model.

Failure and Degradation

Degradation must be explicit rather than accidental. The system reports capability absence, reduced quality, unavailable provider, stale data, or unsafe condition through typed states. It must not silently fall back to broader authority, unrestricted legacy execution, unverified firmware, lossy data migration, or irreversible agent action.

Recovery defines what state is retained, reconstructed, re-enrolled, compensated, or intentionally discarded. Unsupported hardware or providers are rejected at binding time where possible.

Evidence and Acceptance

  • Accepted contribution through full provenance path.
  • Maintainer and response-time metrics.
  • Partner/contact register with result and next action.
  • Evidence records target identity, hardware revision, firmware, source commit, toolchain, configuration, seed, timestamps, artifacts, expected result, actual result, and reviewer.
  • Acceptance requires the referenced tasks to meet their own criteria; prose completion is not implementation completion.

Implementation Obligations

Task Obligation Priority Gate/Milestone Verification
AOS-PLAT-090 Publish developer SDK, debugger, and service test kit P1 M8 fresh external-style onboarding on Linux hosts and reproducible sample component release
AOS-OPEN-060 Design reproducible community hardware kit P1 M10 internal clean-room-style reproduction before external pilot
AOS-COMM-000 Community and Ecosystem epic P1 Continuous monthly project review and gate reconciliation
AOS-COMM-001 Ratify governance and specification lifecycle P0 M0 founder/core-team/legal review and two simulated architecture/community disputes
AOS-COMM-002 Adopt code of conduct and moderation process P0 M0 scenario review including harassment, unsafe instructions, provenance evasion and vendor conflict
AOS-COMM-003 Publish contributor onboarding, DCO, and clean-room disclosure flow P0 M0 new-contributor walkthrough and seeded missing signoff/unknown source/taint cases
AOS-COMM-004 Publish evidence-based public roadmap and support labels P1 M1 architecture/product/legal review and reader comprehension sample
AOS-COMM-011 Create contributor starter tasks and learning paths P2 M8 three external-style contributors complete different paths with measured friction
AOS-COMM-050 Establish hardware maintainer and CI specimen program P1 M8 audit each maintained target and simulate maintainer departure/revision change/security update
AOS-COMM-060 Run external community hardware-kit reproduction pilot P0 M10 EXP-090 by multiple independent environments and at least one non-core maintainer

Risks and Open Questions

  • Community expectations can exceed project capacity.
  • Unreviewed contributions can contaminate provenance.
  • Funding can distort architecture or public claims.
  • Open-question rule: an unanswered high-impact question becomes a claim/experiment record and cannot be hidden in meeting notes.
  • Stop rule: work stops or changes track when legal rights, recovery, debug access, safety, or the required evidence path is unavailable.

Related Documents

Planning Reference Anchors

Community Infrastructure

AOS-PLAT-090 — Publish developer SDK, debugger, and service test kit; AOS-COMM-011 — Create contributor starter tasks and learning paths

Community Principles

AOS-COMM-000 — Community and Ecosystem epic; AOS-COMM-004 — Publish evidence-based public roadmap and support labels

Contribution Path

AOS-COMM-003 — Publish contributor onboarding, DCO, and clean-room disclosure flow

Decision And Conduct

AOS-COMM-002 — Adopt code of conduct and moderation process

Hardware Maintainers

AOS-OPEN-060 — Design reproducible community hardware kit; AOS-COMM-050 — Establish hardware maintainer and CI specimen program; AOS-COMM-060 — Run external community hardware-kit reproduction pilot

Maintainer Model

AOS-COMM-001 — Ratify governance and specification lifecycle