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Community Governance

Shop3 is community-informed, not chaos-driven.

Public Development

Development should happen through public GitHub artefacts:

  • issues for feedback, bugs, requests, and OPS logs;
  • PRs for repository changes;
  • architecture/design docs for major systems;
  • ADRs for major technical decisions.

Decision Flow

A community idea can be accepted, deferred, rejected, or routed elsewhere.

Acceptance considers merchant impact, phase relevance, technical dependency order, compatibility risk, implementation cost, maintenance cost, and performance impact.

Feature Request Evaluation

Feature requests should be evaluated for real problem clarity, usefulness beyond one private store, OpenCart compatibility, responsibility boundaries, maintainability, performance impact, and whether an ADR or architecture doc is needed first.

Rejection Criteria

Reject or defer ideas that require core edits, belong to ERP/payment/shipping/vendor business logic, solve only one private edge case, create excessive configuration, add unjustified dependencies, hurt performance, break compatibility, or cannot be maintained safely.

Relationship To Community-driven Development

docs/community-driven-development.md explains how ideas and donations influence roadmap priority. This document explains how decisions are accepted, deferred, or rejected.

Practical Rule

Community feedback should make the project more useful. It should not make the architecture weaker.