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Loop Engine Governance

Project identity

Loop Engine is an open infrastructure project for constrained, observable, and improvable enterprise operational loops.

It was created by the engineering team at Better Data, where it powers Commerce Chain Optimization across healthcare, pharma, retail, and manufacturing.

Governance model

Loop Engine currently operates under a BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) model. Roadmap direction and final release decisions rest with the founding maintainer team at Better Data.

This model is appropriate for early-stage infrastructure projects. As the contributor base grows, governance will evolve toward a more distributed model. That evolution will be documented here.

What this means in practice

  • External contributions are welcomed and reviewed promptly.
  • Significant feature proposals require an RFC (open an issue with [RFC] in the title).
  • Breaking changes to core types or event schemas require RFC approval plus a 6-month deprecation notice on the prior version before removal.
  • The maintainer team reserves the right to decline contributions that conflict with the project's design principles (see docs/architecture.md).

Maintainers

See MAINTAINERS.md for the current maintainer list.

Decision-making

Routine contributions (bug fixes, documentation, new adapters, new loop definitions): Maintainer review and approval is sufficient. No RFC required.

New packages or significant API changes: RFC required. Minimum 2-week comment period before implementation begins.

Breaking changes to @loop-engine/core, @loop-engine/events, or @loop-engine/loop-definition: RFC required. 6-month deprecation window on the prior version before removal.

Rationale: event schemas are consumed by AI training pipelines downstream. An unexpected schema change can cause silent data corruption weeks or months later. This window gives consumers time to migrate safely.

Commercial relationship

Better Data builds commercial products on top of Loop Engine. Those products are maintained separately at github.com/betterdataco.

Loop Engine's OSS roadmap is not dictated by Better Data's product roadmap. Features required only by Better Data's proprietary platform will not be added to this repo — they belong in betterdataco/*, not here.

RFC process

  1. Open a GitHub issue with [RFC] in the title
  2. Describe: the problem, the proposed change, alternatives considered
  3. Minimum 2-week comment period
  4. Maintainer team votes — simple majority required
  5. If approved: open a PR referencing the RFC issue
  6. Link the merged PR back to the RFC issue when closing

Full RFC guidance: docs/governance/rfc-process

Contact

Governance questions: oss@betterdata.co Code of Conduct reports: conduct@loopengine.io