Governance guidance for CNCF projects: Choosing the right structure for your project’s size and stage

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee published governance guidance that distills patterns from reviews of 72 graduated, incubating and archived projects. The guidance separates what the foundation requires at each maturity level from what the data recommends for long-term health. It presents three governance templates, Maintainer Council, Elected Steering Committee and a third template, each mapped to a project archetype.

Adopting the Maintainer Council model requires a MAINTAINERS file with affiliations, a documented process for adding and removing maintainers, emeritus status, lazy consensus and defined voting thresholds for governance changes. The Elected Steering Committee model adds an election process with eligibility rules, term limits, company representation caps and delegation to working groups or SIGs. Implementing these structures introduces administrative overhead that small teams may find burdensome.

The guidance notes that the models stop working when a project lacks a sufficient contributor base to hold meaningful elections or when org-balance mechanisms are limited to the governance layer but not applied to the maintainer body. In such cases documentation alone fails to prevent concentration, and projects can experience post-graduation governance decline. Therefore the guidance advises teams to match the chosen template to their actual scale and to evolve the structure as the project grows or shrinks.