Draft, November 2026.
The xd Crossword Corpus is maintained by Saul Pwanson, who started it in 2016, and Alex DeJarnatt. The maintainers do the work, decide the policies, review contributions and grant access. The corpus is a project of Century Arcade, Saul’s organization for century-scale preservation of games and puzzles.
The two maintainers decide by agreeing. Most decisions are made in conversation and recorded as a commit, a merge request, or a line in DECISIONS.md. A decision that changes a policy document is made by changing the document.
Rules in the policy and editorial documents carry one of three marks:
A rule becomes established when both maintainers agree and it is written. If they disagree, it stays proposed. There is no casting vote and no deadline.
Anyone can propose a change by opening an issue or a pull request in this repository. Contributors to the corpus can also raise questions on a merge request or on Discord. Proposals are answered by the maintainers; accepted ones are logged in DECISIONS.md.
The maintainers consult a small number of advisors: people who bring a perspective the maintainers do not have, such as a constructor or editor, a researcher who uses the corpus, an archivist, or someone with experience of rights and licensing. Advisors are asked for their views once a year, when the policies and the preservation assessment are reviewed, and when a hard case comes up. They do not vote and have no duties.
Advisors are listed here with their consent. (None yet listed.)
If one maintainer stops, the other continues alone, with full authority, and may invite a new co-maintainer.
If both stop, the corpus is to pass to a successor custodian who has agreed in advance to receive it. The successor gets the repository, the source archives, and this governance, and may run the corpus as they see fit within the access terms. (No successor is yet named. Naming one is on the preservation plan.)
Whoever maintains the corpus holds the credentials to its hosting and knows where every copy is. The maintainers keep a private inventory of these for each other.
This document is reviewed once a year with the preservation assessment. Last reviewed: November 2026 (first version).