Establish OSS Operating Principles (closes #25)

[michaeloboyle]

Summary

Adds the Open Source Committee Operating Principles as version-controlled markdown at docs/operating-guidelines/operating-principles.md, resolving #25. They live in the repo and are amended via pull request, per the June 10 decision to prioritize GitHub over standalone documents.

These are the committee's day-to-day working rules of engagement. They sit below the Committee Charter (#9) and the Agentics Foundation mission above them, and above the mechanical OSS intake process below them. They are deliberately short and meant to accrete testable definitions through tracked issues rather than swell into a fixed document.

The eight principles

1. Humans judge, agents execute (AF-GOV-002) - agents analyze and run logistics; they never vote, escalate, or retract.
2. Issues over documents - decisions and artifacts live as tracked issues with named owners.
3. The governance doc is the source of truth - code follows the doc, not the reverse.
4. Repos are learning resources, not just libraries - the committee's value is guidance, balances, security, and provenance, not raw volume.
5. Member-only, mission-aligned intake - members in good standing, open source with a clear license, advancing the agentic AI ecosystem.
6. Two-step, simple-majority voting - escalation vote then validation vote, 50%+1 of active members; no self-voting.
7. Tiered stewardship - T1 Foundation-Owned / T2 Foundation-Endorsed / T3 Community-Associated (Define AF OSS tiers (naming and definitions) #10).
8. Auditability by default - every status change, score, and vote leaves a durable trail; no decisions in DMs.

Open questions to mature next

• Concrete acceptance thresholds per category (donation vs listing vs support).
• CLA / DCO / IP-transfer instrument before any real donation completes (gates the SummaryBot #33 pilot; needs legal counsel).
• Snyk / package-risk evaluation as a standardized pre-review check.
• Definition of "agentic AI ecosystem" scope.

Notes

• No @mentions in the doc; all references are to issue numbers (Establish OSS Committee Charter #9, Define AF OSS tiers (naming and definitions) #10, #33). Tier and people references match data/committee-config.json (authoritative).
• PKM frontmatter and the "staged for review" banner from the source draft were stripped; the committed doc reads as a finished governance doc matching the charter and docs/scoring-template.md style.

Closes #25

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[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Adds a new governance-as-code document defining the OSS Open Source Committee’s operating principles, intended to sit between the committee charter and the mechanical intake process, and to be amended via PRs (closes #25).

Changes:

• Introduces docs/operating-guidelines/operating-principles.md documenting eight operating principles for committee operations.
• Captures a set of “open questions” to mature via follow-up issues rather than expanding the document.
• Establishes an explicit authority chain and relationship to the charter/intake process.

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[michaeloboyle]

Addressed Copilot review feedback in 76f11ac:

• "day to day" -> "day-to-day" (L16): Fixed for consistency with the rest of the doc.
• "50%+1" ambiguity (L46): Reworded to "a simple majority of members voting" to avoid the discrete-vote ambiguity. (The charter in Establish OSS Committee Charter (closes #9) #26 retains "simple majority (50% + 1)"; the operating-principles wording is now the cleaner "simple majority" phrasing.)
• committee-charter.md references (L9, L66): Already cite both the path and the tracking issue, e.g. "the Committee Charter (committee-charter.md, issue Establish OSS Committee Charter #9)", so no change was needed. The path resolves once Establish OSS Committee Charter (closes #9) #26 merges.

Verified zero em dashes.