# OUDEA Governance

OUDEA is an open architecture with a canonical specification maintained by Liberbyte GmbH.

## Canonical authority

Liberbyte GmbH maintains the canonical OUDEA specification, terminology, version identifiers and governance process. This provides one stable interoperability target while allowing independent implementations.

The canonical source repository is intended to be:

`https://codeberg.org/Liberbyte/OUDEA`

## Independent implementations

OUDEA does not require use of bytEM, Liberbyte-hosted infrastructure, a particular storage engine, internal processing topology, queue design, bot architecture, or user interface.

An independent implementation may use different internal architecture while targeting the same public OUDEA contracts and protocol binding requirements.

## Change process

Changes to OUDEA Core should be evaluated against four questions:

1. Is the structure or behavior required for independent interoperability?
2. Is it stable independently of the current bytEM implementation?
3. Could an implementation change its internal storage or orchestration without changing this contract?
4. Can another implementation understand the contract without reading bytEM source code?

If the answer is no, the feature is normally implementation-specific rather than OUDEA Core.

## Versions

Published OUDEA versions are explicit interoperability targets. A new version may add or refine public contracts while preserving the meaning of existing stable identifiers where possible.

Breaking changes must be visible as specification-version changes rather than silently changing the meaning of an existing published contract.

## External standards

OUDEA may align with or reference external semantic and metadata models. Such models complement OUDEA and do not become mandatory unless a specific OUDEA profile explicitly requires them.

## Contributions

Proposals, issues and specification contributions should be made through the canonical repository `https://codeberg.org/Liberbyte/OUDEA`, or through `oudea-feedback@liberbyte.com`.

## Canonical repository

The canonical OUDEA repository is public at `https://codeberg.org/Liberbyte/OUDEA`.