governance-and-sustainability

governance-and-sustainability is a skill for Claude Code from the-open-agent/oss-skills. It costs 95 tokens per session (2,489 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A set of practices for deciding how an open-source project makes decisions, changes maintainers, and continues over time.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps define maintainer roles, decision rules, contributor conduct, funding, and how responsibility can be handed over.
Why use it?
It prevents a project from depending entirely on one person or adding formal process before the project needs it.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the oss-skills plugin — 18 skills shipped together

Good fit It helps define maintainer roles, decision rules, contributor conduct, funding, and how responsibility can be handed over.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/governance-and-sustainability
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add the-open-agent/oss-skills --skill governance-and-sustainability
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/the-open-agent/oss-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install oss-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 18 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for governance-and-sustainability

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/governance-and-sustainability/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/governance-and-sustainability)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/governance-and-sustainability"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/governance-and-sustainability/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for governance-and-sustainability

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/governance-and-sustainability"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/governance-and-sustainability.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 95 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,489 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00095 $0.02489
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.01244
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00498
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00249

Measured 12d ago against content hash adf2b9308b7f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

governance-and-sustainability scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/governance-and-sustainability/SKILL.md · 220 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 220 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Governance and Sustainability

Most open-source projects do not die from technical debt. They die because the person maintaining them stopped wanting to, and there was no structure for anyone else to take over.

Add process only when the pain is real

Governance documents for a one-person project are cosplay. Match structure to size:

Size Governance
1 maintainer None. A Scope section in the README is enough.
2–3 maintainers A written norm: who merges, how you break ties. A paragraph.
4–10 GOVERNANCE.md: roles, how maintainers are added/removed, decision process.
10+, or corporate stakeholders Formal: steering committee, voting, possibly a foundation.

Grow into each level when the previous one visibly fails — typically at the first disagreement nobody knows how to resolve.

Decision-making models

  • BDFL — one person decides. Fast, clear, and the default. Fails on bus factor and when the BDFL burns out or becomes unresponsive. Honest, and fine for years.
  • Consensus-seeking — discuss until nobody blocks. Works well for 3–8 people who trust each other. Requires someone empowered to call the question, or threads run forever.
  • Voting — for formal projects with real stakes. Slow, and adversarial by design; reserve it for the decisions that need legitimacy more than speed.
  • RFC process — for user-visible changes in projects with many stakeholders. A written proposal, a public comment period, an explicit decision recorded in the repo. Adopt this when design arguments start recurring in issue threads. It is heavier than it looks; do not add it before you need it.

Whatever the model, record decisions where people can find them. An ADR (docs/decisions/0007-drop-node-18.md) with context → decision → consequences takes ten minutes and prevents the same argument in a year, with a different person.

GOVERNANCE.md, minimal version

# Governance

## Roles
- **Contributor** — anyone who opens a PR or issue.
- **Committer** — merge rights. Added by maintainer consensus after sustained
  contribution. Listed in MAINTAINERS.md.
- **Maintainer** — committer + release rights + CoC enforcement.

## Decisions
Day-to-day changes: one committer approval merges.
Breaking changes, new dependencies, scope changes: an issue with the `needs-decision`
label, open at least 72 hours, resolved by maintainer consensus. Any maintainer may
block with a stated technical reason.

## Adding maintainers
Nominated by an existing maintainer, approved by consensus. Criteria: sustained
contribution, good review judgment, helps other contributors.

## Removing maintainers
12 months of inactivity moves a maintainer to emeritus (no access, credit retained).
Reinstatement on request. Removal for cause requires consensus of the others.

## Scope
<What this project does and, specifically, what it does not.>

Read the full file on GitHub · 220 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 220 lines · 95 tokens per session scan A adf2b9308b7f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

governance-and-sustainability is a skill published in the GitHub repository the-open-agent/oss-skills (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 95 tokens to every session and 2,489 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.