docs: add Release Operator policy

[claude]

Requested by Samuel Attard, George Xu · Slack thread

Before: no governance document defines who may perform Sudowoodo management actions (manually queueing releases, retrying, cancelling/cleaning up steps, creating release branches). sudowoodo.md only references undefined "authorized releasers", and the real gate lives implicitly in team configuration.

After: this policy defines the Release Operator role:

• Granting: any Releases WG member may nominate a governance member; approval requires a 2/3 super-majority vote of the full sitting Releases WG membership, with reasonable effort to collect votes asynchronously per the Charter, recorded in meeting notes.
• Evaluating nominations: the status is framed as a grant of trust, not a reward for activity. The WG weighs whether the nominee is a known and trusted actor in the ecosystem — signals include a long track record of sustained contribution, being personally known to maintainers (including in-person), and corporate backing that shares responsibility for their actions; these are signals, not requirements. Self-nomination is not permitted — a nomination shall come from a Releases WG member other than the nominee.
• Revoking: automatic on leaving governance; alongside WG removal under the existing WG Removal Policy (unless the WG votes to retain); or at any time by the same 2/3 vote — no cause required, a risk-mitigation lever, not a judgement.
• Emergency (break-glass) removal: any Infrastructure WG member may immediately remove a Release Operator on suspected compromise or misuse, reported to the Releases WG within 24 hours, which ratifies the removal or reinstates via the normal vote.
• Enforcement: the role is mirrored as a release-operators team in electron/.permissions, which Sudowoodo resolves to gate management actions; updated within 7 days of any vote and verified via /sudowoodo-trainers.
• Initial membership: the current holders of the privilege (members of both the Releases WG and mergers) are grandfathered in, ratified by merging this PR: @ckerr, @codebytere, @dsanders11, @jkleinsc, @MarshallOfSound, @VerteDinde.

Note: @georgexu99 is not grandfathered (not currently in mergers) and would be the first nomination under the new vote process.

This PR also adds an offboarding checklist item to wg-infra/policy/leaving-governance.md to remove departing members from the release-operators team.

Notes:

• The npm 2FA/OTP entry step is intentionally untouched — any Releases WG member may enter the OTP, unchanged.
• Follow-ups deliberately not in this PR: creating the release-operators team in electron/.permissions, and pointing Sudowoodo's management-action gate at that team.
• The team name release-operators is easy to change before this merges if the WG prefers another name.

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https://claude.ai/code/session_01Quf1aMvhdMWg8sJJsG6nZJ

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