New MAINTAINERS.md Requirement - Improving Project Transparency

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Juan Estrella

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May 20, 2026, 9:02:29 AM (4 days ago) May 20

to finos-projec...@finos.org, FINOS General Community List

Dear FINOS Community,

To improve transparency, streamline project governance, and align with industry best practices, we are initiating a rollout of a standardized MAINTAINERS.md file across the root of every FINOS repository.

Why are we doing this?

Clear signaling of project leadership is a cornerstone of a healthy open-source ecosystem. While many of our projects currently track maintainers in various places (READMEs, websites, or GitHub permissions), a dedicated, standardized file ensures that contributors know exactly who to reach out to for reviews, guidance, and project decisions.

The Benefits

Standardizing this practice aligns FINOS with Linux Foundation standards for sustainable project management. Key benefits include:

Transparency: New contributors can immediately identify the decision-makers.
Sustainability: It provides a clear framework for leadership evolution and succession planning.
Recognition: It gives formal, public credit to the individuals and organizations driving the project forward.
Compliance: It simplifies the process of ensuring projects meet FINOS and LF open governance requirements.

How and When

To make this transition as seamless as possible, we will run scripts to automatically open Pull Requests across FINOS repositories, seeding a template file for you with information from the GitHub maintainers teams. You can expect a PR in the coming days.

What Project Maintainers need to do:

Review the automated PR once it lands in your repository.
Verify or update the listed names, GitHub handles, emails, and organizations to ensure accuracy.
Merge the PR to complete the setup.

Maintaining the File: Public Updates & Voting

To ensure our governance remains open and neutral, all updates to the maintainer list, particularly the election of new maintainers, must be handled publicly:

Public Proposal: Any change to the maintainer group must be submitted via a Pull Request (PR) to the MAINTAINERS.md file.
Consensus & Voting: If the project's governance requires a vote for new maintainers, the results of that vote must be documented or referenced within the PR comments.
Audit Trail: This process ensures that the history of project leadership is preserved and visible to the entire community.

If you have any questions regarding the format or the process, please feel free to reach out directly at he...@finos.org.

Best,