H.4.6 External Contributions

A shared internal repository and an external contribution boundary need an explicit synchronization and trust model.

• Define whether contributions arrive through forks, mirrors, exported subsets, patches, or an upstream-first workflow and which side is authoritative.
• Preserve authorship and required contributor agreement or sign-off evidence without treating paperwork as technical trust.
• Redact or exclude confidential source, history, review context, generated output, and internal metadata before they cross the boundary.
• Run untrusted changes with bounded credentials, data, network, compute, artifacts, and approval authority.
• Assign synchronization conflicts, review, release, vulnerability response, and long-term maintenance to named internal and external roles.