§1 Scope

This document governs the standards track: everything `CONTRIBUTING.md` places in its high-ceremony tier — standards/ (every release directory and the current draft) and the frozen historical locations spec/ and lexicons/; packages/ver-validator/ (the conformance profile and the VERxxx registry it implements); conformance/ (the fixture corpus); the decision record that ties them together (docs/adr/, docs/standards/ including the errata ledger, `COMPATIBILITY.md`, `CHANGELOG.md`, `VERSIONING.md`, and this document); and the release and tagging process in VERSIONING.md §3.3.

It does not govern services/, apps/, scripts/, or tests/ — the VER-F reference pipeline. That tree is an experimental prototype (`SECURITY.md`) governed by ordinary code review: green gates (ruff check ., pytest -q), normal pull-request review, no ADR and no ratification vote required. A change that touches both trees in one motivation still lands as two commits (CONTRIBUTING.md, "Commits and pull requests"), and only the standards-track commit is subject to what follows.