AURORA's growth is governed by a public council, three working groups, and an RFC process. Today these run with pilot partners; at public alpha they open to anyone.
The council reviews RFCs, allocates priorities and ratifies releases. Six-month terms. Every vote logged.
One seat per major specialty represented in current modules: neuro-oncology, paediatric neurosurgery, fetal medicine, craniofacial.
Computational biology / imaging research seats; rotate across institutions.
Reserved for an active maintainer of the AURORA core substrate.
Independent ethics seat; cannot be filled by core team members.
Reserved for an LMIC-program representative — never empty.
Two permanent seats for patient and family advocates. Plain-language reviews of every release.
Co-design sessions with module leads and partner hospitals. Owns the decision-support surfaces, audit trails and override semantics. Weekly office hours.
The federation runtime, provenance and signing, deployment targets, observability. The "boring" group that everything else depends on. Bi-weekly.
Equity-as-loss, consent metadata, bias audits, model-card standards. Veto rights at the release gate. Meets at every release candidate.
New disease modules and major architectural changes enter AURORA through an RFC. The first eight modules followed this path.
Six stages, public minutes at every step.
One-pager naming the disease, substrate sketch, candidate sponsors.
≥1 clinical, ≥1 research. Two are stronger than four.
Quorum-driven discussion. Ratify, revise, or decline — minutes published.
Ratified RFCs trigger a module skeleton — repos, model cards, contracts.
Scoping period with sponsors. No clinical surface ships yet.
First public alpha under MIT alongside model cards and equity audit.
Every RFC has a paper trail from first draft to ratification.
Submissions and ratifications, by quarter. Bigger queue means more pressure on review bandwidth — not necessarily more shipping.
We follow a plain-language code of conduct based on the Contributor Covenant, adapted for the clinical context. The short version:
Be precise. Be kind. Disagree on the substance; never on the person. When a patient or family advocate is in the room, the room belongs to them first.
Maintainers enforce the code. Persistent violations cost commit access and council eligibility. There is no special tier for "important" contributors.
Eight ways to plug in. Pick one, fill the fields, and either post it to the ideas board on this device, copy it as Markdown for GitHub, or open your mail client with a pre-filled message to the right AURORA inbox.
Pitch a new disease module to the council — RFC-style.
Posted submissions live in this browser only (until you send them via email). They are not synced to a server.