RFC: Neuroglancer governance proposal

[fcollman]

Add community governance documentation

This PR establishes a governance structure for Neuroglancer by adding a GOVERNANCE section to the Sphinx documentation at docs/governance/governance.rst.

Motivation

Neuroglancer has become a foundational tool for the connectomics and high-dimensional imaging communities. The project has reached a scale where the current single-maintainer model creates friction:

Review latency: Useful contributions sit in the PR queue due to a lack of empowered reviewers
Maintainer burnout: The burden of both architectural vision and day-to-day maintenance on a single individual is unsustainable
Institutional risk: Organizations relying on Neuroglancer need a transparent governance path to justify continued engineering investment

What this establishes

A tiered "Ladder of Participation" (Contributors → Community Managers → Reviewers → Maintainers → Technical Lead) with a Steering Committee responsible for the roadmap, promotions, and structural health of the project. Key operational policies include a two-approvals merge policy, PR escalation for stale reviews, stale PR closing, and a lazy-consensus model for designated subsystem owners.

This document is itself the first RFC in the process it describes — please use PR review comments for discussion.

Implementation roadmap

Month 1 (this PR): Merge governance documentation; add a GOVERNANCE.md and update CONTRIBUTING.md
Month 2: First Steering Committee meeting to vote on the initial cohort of Community Managers, Reviewers, Maintainers, and subsystem definitions; Jeremy updates repository permissions accordingly
Month 3: Community prepares roadmap proposals for the Steering Committee
Month 4: Second Steering Committee meeting — iterate on membership, assess effectiveness of the model, discuss and approve 1–2 major roadmap items

Feedback requested

Jeremy Maitin-Shepard: Does the Technical Lead framing accurately reflect how you'd like to engage, and does this model give you the space you need?
Institutional stakeholders: Does this structure provide enough stability to justify continued engineering investment?
Active contributors: Are the roles and promotion path clear enough to guide your participation?

[seankmartin]

thank you very much for the thoughtful document @fcollman

[stuarteberg]

I agree, thanks for putting this forward. Looks quite reasonable to me. I've sent this around to interested folks here at Janelia to get their thoughts.

[jbms]

Thanks Forrest for creating this governance plan --- as we discussed, this plan looks great to me.