# Governance

## Mission
As a vital component of vLLM, the vLLM Ascend project is dedicated to providing an easy, fast, and cheap LLM Serving for Everyone on Ascend NPU, and to actively contribute to the enrichment of vLLM. 

## Principles
vLLM Ascend follows the vLLM community's code of conduct：[vLLM - CODE OF CONDUCT](https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md)

## Governance - Mechanics
vLLM Ascend is an open-source project under the vLLM community, where the authority to appoint roles is ultimately determined by the vLLM community. It adopts a hierarchical technical governance structure.

- Contributor:

    **Responsibility:** Help new contributors on boarding, handle and respond to community questions, review RFCs, code

    **Requirements:** Complete at least 1 contribution. Contributor is someone who consistently and actively participates in a project, included but not limited to issue/review/commits/community involvement. 

    Contributors will be empowered [vllm-project/vllm-ascend](https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm-ascend) Github repo `Triage` permissions (`Can read and clone this repository. Can also manage issues and pull requests`) to help community developers collaborate more efficiently.

- Maintainer:

    **Responsibility:** Develop the project's vision and mission. Maintainers are responsible for driving the technical direction of the entire project and ensuring its overall success, possessing code merge permissions. They formulate the roadmap, review contributions from community members, continuously contribute code, and actively engage in community activities (such as regular meetings/events).

    **Requirements:** Deep understanding of ‌vLLM‌ and ‌vLLM Ascend‌ codebases, with a commitment to sustained code contributions. Competency in ‌design/development/PR review workflows‌.
    - **Review Quality‌:** Actively participate in community code reviews, ensuring high-quality code integration.
    - **Quality Contribution‌:** Successfully develop and deliver at least one major feature while maintaining consistent high-quality contributions.
    - **Community Involvement‌:** Actively address issues, respond to forum inquiries, participate in discussions, and engage in community-driven tasks.

    Requires approval from existing Maintainers. The vLLM community has the final decision-making authority.

    Maintainer will be empowered [vllm-project/vllm-ascend](https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm-ascend) Github repo write permissions (`Can read, clone, and push to this repository. Can also manage issues and pull requests`).

## Nominating and Removing Maintainers

### The Principles

- Membership in vLLM Ascend is given to individuals on merit basis after they demonstrated strong expertise of the vLLM / vLLM Ascend through contributions, reviews and discussions.

- For membership in the maintainer group the individual has to demonstrate strong and continued alignment with the overall vLLM / vLLM Ascend principles.

- Light criteria of moving module maintenance to ‘emeritus’ status if they don’t actively participate over long periods of time.

- The membership is for an individual, not a company.

### Nomination and Removal

- Nomination: Anyone can nominate someone to become a maintainer (include self-nominate). All existing maintainers are responsible for evaluating the nomination. The nominator should provide nominee's info around the strength of the candidate to be a maintainer, include but not limited to review quality, quality contribution, community involvement.
- Removal: Anyone can nominate a person to be removed from maintainer position (include self-nominate). All existing maintainers are responsible for evaluating the nomination. The nominator should provide nominee's info, include but not limited to lack of activity, conflict with the overall direction and other information that makes them unfit to be a maintainer.
