Add PROJECT_STATES.md and ai-governance-operational-gaps.md

[mj3b]

Two documents drafted in response to the CDCF board and advisory council review session, Wednesday March 11, 2026.

PROJECT_STATES.md defines the three project states (Experimental, Incubating, Active), captures decisions confirmed on March 11 with attribution, and maps current CDCF projects to their formal vetting status.

ai-governance-operational-gaps.md identifies five operational governance gaps in the current vetting framework with named owners, specific failure scenarios, and proposed resolutions for each.

Both documents are grounded in the CDCF Manifesto, CDCF Bylaws, and CDCF Project Vetting Criteria v0.1.

[JohnRDOrazio]

I have just implemented the deploy steps, to publish the documentation to the website, it is now live under the "Governance" menu item in 6 different languages: https://catholicdigitalcommons.org/project-vetting-criteria. I mentioned to the rest of the board in last wednesday's meet that I attempted to translate your documentation from AI projects to more general CDCF project, please take a look and provide any feedback you think is useful.

As regards the current PR, it seems to me that these are more notes to be taken into consideration, rather than documentation to publish to the website?

[mj3b]

Thank you for publishing the governance documentation and for the translation to a general project framework. The site looks excellent. I reviewed the full governance section at catholicdigitalcommons.org/governance.

On your question about the two documents in this PR:
You are correct that ai-governance-operational-gaps.md is not for publication. It identifies five operational gaps in the current vetting framework with named owners and proposed resolutions. Each one requires board or council review before it becomes a public commitment. I would suggest routing it internally and the relevant council members rather than merging it to the repo for now. I am happy to close it out of this PR if that is cleaner.

PROJECT_STATES.md is intended as a complement to the Project Lifecycle page you have already published at catholicdigitalcommons.org/governance/project-governance/lifecycle. Your lifecycle document describes the process flow. PROJECT_STATES.md captures the operational meaning of each state for contributors, institutions, and the aggregator, along with the decisions confirmed on March 11 with attribution and the formal vetting status of the four current projects.

One terminology question worth resolving before publication: the March 11 session confirmed "states" rather than "stages" as the preferred language. Your lifecycle page currently uses "stages" in the section headings. Worth aligning those before the next publish so the site is consistent.

Happy to revise PROJECT_STATES.md to fit the structure you have already established on the site rather than introducing a separate document. Let me know what works best.