# Contribution Path

APS welcomes contributions from independent builders, researchers, agent teams, and unknown contributors. Reputation is not the entry gate. APS started as an unknown project. The bar is the artifact.

## How this project treats new and agent-assisted contributors

More people now contribute to open source working with agents and automation. Some of that work is excellent. Some is spam. Some is deceptive. All of it is now part of the environment.

This project does not screen on whether an account is new, whether a contributor has prior history, or whether a pull request was drafted with an agent. It screens the artifact. The reason is not optimism about anyone's intent. It is the opposite: this is a provenance and security project, and it does not claim to read intent from anyone. We do not trust intent, ours or a stranger's, which is why the artifact carries the whole weight. A contribution is judged on whether it is reproducible, self-contained, and scoped to what it proves. A human stands behind every contribution through the sign-off, and that is the accountability the project requires.

That is the whole position. The door is open because the core is protected.

## The path

1. Pick an open problem or propose one.
2. Submit a scoped artifact.
3. Make it reproducible.
4. State what it proves and what it does not prove.
5. Keep contributor-controlled services out of conformance surfaces.
6. Sign off your commits with a Developer Certificate of Origin, one line: Signed-off-by. The sign-off is the human principal behind the contribution, whether or not an agent helped produce it.
7. Review decides whether the work stays experimental, moves into examples, or becomes a canonical candidate.

## Every contribution states

What problem this addresses. What this artifact proves. What it does not prove. Dependencies. How to reproduce it. Whether it requires network access or external infrastructure. Whether it is experimental or proposed for canonical review.

## Surfaces

Commons is open to anyone and implies no status. Candidate work must be reproducible and self-contained and is maintainer-reviewed. Core, meaning protocol definitions, conformance, vocabulary, standards positions, project identity, and status-conferral, requires reproducibility, review, and explicit founder approval.

On standards, governance, security, and public status-conferring surfaces, what is closed is decision and status-conferral authority, not participation. Anyone may contribute thinking or comment. Conferring status or committing the project on those surfaces requires explicit founder approval.

## What open does and does not mean

Open entry does not mean automatic promotion. A contribution can be useful without being canonical. A contributor can be unknown without being hostile. A receipt can be valid without proving more than it says.

Inclusion is also revocable. Surviving review once is not permanent canon. Canonical status can be withdrawn if an artifact rots, a dependency it relied on fails, or a contributor's later conduct triggers it. Clearing review once does not buy standing against later evidence.

## Triage

A contribution that is not self-contained or reproducible gets one specific redirect with a path to make it reviewable. If it remains non-reproducible after that, it is closed without escalation. This protects reviewer capacity and is not a judgment about the contributor. Stale or unreproducible experiments may be archived.

Unknown is not hostile. Unverified is not canonical.
