Add PROJECT_STATES.md and ai-governance-operational-gaps.md

[mj3b]

Two documents drafted in response to the CDCF board and advisory council review session, Wednesday March 11, 2026.

PROJECT_STATES.md defines the three project states (Experimental, Incubating, Active), captures decisions confirmed on March 11 with attribution, and maps current CDCF projects to their formal vetting status.

ai-governance-operational-gaps.md identifies five operational governance gaps in the current vetting framework with named owners, specific failure scenarios, and proposed resolutions for each.

Both documents are grounded in the CDCF Manifesto, CDCF Bylaws, and CDCF Project Vetting Criteria v0.1.

[JohnRDOrazio]

I have just implemented the deploy steps, to publish the documentation to the website, it is now live under the "Governance" menu item in 6 different languages: https://catholicdigitalcommons.org/project-vetting-criteria. I mentioned to the rest of the board in last wednesday's meet that I attempted to translate your documentation from AI projects to more general CDCF project, please take a look and provide any feedback you think is useful.

As regards the current PR, it seems to me that these are more notes to be taken into consideration, rather than documentation to publish to the website?

[mj3b]

Thank you for publishing the governance documentation and for the translation to a general project framework. The site looks excellent. I reviewed the full governance section at catholicdigitalcommons.org/governance.

On your question about the two documents in this PR:
You are correct that ai-governance-operational-gaps.md is not for publication. It identifies five operational gaps in the current vetting framework with named owners and proposed resolutions. Each one requires board or council review before it becomes a public commitment. I would suggest routing it internally and the relevant council members rather than merging it to the repo for now. I am happy to close it out of this PR if that is cleaner.

PROJECT_STATES.md is intended as a complement to the Project Lifecycle page you have already published at catholicdigitalcommons.org/governance/project-governance/lifecycle. Your lifecycle document describes the process flow. PROJECT_STATES.md captures the operational meaning of each state for contributors, institutions, and the aggregator, along with the decisions confirmed on March 11 with attribution and the formal vetting status of the four current projects.

One terminology question worth resolving before publication: the March 11 session confirmed "states" rather than "stages" as the preferred language. Your lifecycle page currently uses "stages" in the section headings. Worth aligning those before the next publish so the site is consistent.

Happy to revise PROJECT_STATES.md to fit the structure you have already established on the site rather than introducing a separate document. Let me know what works best.

[JohnRDOrazio]

The ai-governance-operational-gaps.md file in this PR is discussion material rather than documentation intended for website publication. Documents committed to this repository are published to the website via the deploy workflow, so discussion material should live in the Discussions area instead.

The contents of ai-governance-operational-gaps.md have been posted as a discussion:

🗣️ CDCF AI Governance: Five Operational Gaps (Ideas category)

Please remove ai-governance-operational-gaps.md from this PR so that only PROJECT_STATES.md remains for review. The five operational gaps can be discussed and iterated on in the discussion thread, and any resulting process documents or policy changes can be submitted as separate PRs once consensus is reached.

[JohnRDOrazio]

Assessment of PROJECT_STATES.md

Like ai-governance-operational-gaps.md, this document mixes published governance documentation with discussion material about specific projects and meeting decisions. Beyond that, most of its content is already covered by existing documentation.

Overlap with existing docs

PROJECT_STATES.md section	Already covered by
Three states (Experimental → Incubating → Active)	project-governance/lifecycle.md (Proposal → Incubation → Graduation → Active → Retirement)
What each state means for contributors and institutions	project-governance/project-types.md (Foundation Projects vs Community Projects)
Gate 1 / Gate 2 criteria mapping	project-governance/project-vetting-criteria.md (the entire two-gate framework)
Gate 2 subsidiarity requirement with sources	project-governance/project-vetting-criteria.md Criterion 8 (same sources already cited)
Glossary of states	project-governance/definitions.md (Incubating, Active/Graduated, Retired)

Discussion material that should not be in published documentation

• Origin section — attributed meeting notes from the March 11, 2026 board session
• Current CDCF Projects by State table — status of 4 specific projects (Catholic Semantic Canon, OntoKit, Bible API, Liturgical Calendar API)
• Comparison with secular incubators — argumentative/persuasive framing rather than normative governance documentation

Potentially new contributions

Three ideas in PROJECT_STATES.md are not explicitly present in the current docs, but they are marginal:

1. "Experimental" pre-vetting state — but project-types.md already defines "Community Projects" (not vetted, not endorsed, visible in the ecosystem) and lifecycle.md has a "Proposal Phase" for pre-incubation
2. "States not stages" framing (projects can remain Experimental indefinitely) — but project-types.md already says Community Projects "may never seek or need formal CDCF governance"
3. Gate 1 = "the why" / Gate 2 = "the how" — a nice one-line characterization that could be added to the vetting criteria or lifecycle doc as a minor edit

Recommendation

PROJECT_STATES.md does not offer substantive content beyond what the existing documentation already covers. The meeting notes and project status discussion should be posted as a Discussion. If the "Experimental" state concept or the Gate 1/Gate 2 "why vs how" framing are considered valuable additions, they can be incorporated as minor edits to the existing lifecycle.md or project-vetting-criteria.md in a focused PR.

This file should be removed from the PR along with ai-governance-operational-gaps.md.

[mj3b]

Fr. John R. D'Orazio — your assessment is accurate, and I appreciate the time you took to map the overlap against the published documentation.

Both files are removed from this PR. Closing it.

On ai-governance-operational-gaps.md — agreed this is discussion material. Thank you for opening the Discussion thread. I'll engage the five gaps there and let the councils weigh in before any of it becomes a proposed process document or bylaws amendment.

On PROJECT_STATES.md — the overlap is real. The three items you identified as potentially new (the "Experimental" pre-vetting concept, the "states not stages" framing, and the Gate 1 = why / Gate 2 = how one-liner) I'd like to propose as a focused follow-on PR with minor edits to lifecycle.md and project-vetting-criteria.md, consistent with your recommendation. I'll open that as a separate PR once drafted.

Thank you again for the translation work to a general CDCF project framework and the six-language deploy. The published site is stronger than what I submitted here.