Tripal Governance
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Changes to this Document
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These guidelines are binding to the Tripal Community. If you have comments, suggestions or constructive criticism please bring it up in a [comment on the github issue](https://github.com/tripal/tripal/issues/344). Changes to this document will be made after adequate discussion has occurred and the project management committee has voted in favour of the change.

The above document makes us a sort of hybrid between a [meritocracy and liberal contribution model](https://opensource.guide/leadership-and-governance/#what-are-some-of-the-common-governance-structures-for-open-source-projects).


Governance Structure
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The Tripal project recognizes these roles:

- Users - They have downloaded Tripal!  Maybe they even have a site!
- Contributors - contributing!  Code, comments, discussion, questions, bug reports.
- Committers - write access to the repository.
- PMC - Makes **code relevant** decisions.
- Oversight committee - Makes **policy level** decisions.  This may overlap with PMC, but the idea is the oversight committee includes parties who are **not necessarily coders** and therefore not reviewing Pull requests etc.