Summary

Establish a documented policy for closing issues and discussions that have gone inactive. The current governance and contributing docs define contributor inactivity thresholds (six months for role review) but have no equivalent policy for stale issues or discussions.

Motivation

Open backlogs with long-idle items create noise for contributors and maintainers. A clear, published policy sets expectations with the community and enables future automation (e.g., GitHub's stale bot or scheduled actions).

Proposed Policy Elements

• Warning period: Issues and discussions with no activity for 60 days receive a bot comment or label (stale) notifying participants.
• Closure threshold: Items that remain inactive for 30 additional days after the warning are closed with a closed-stale label.
• Exemptions: Items with pinned, security, or milestone assignment are exempt from automatic closure.
• Reopening: Any participant can reopen a stale-closed item with new context; reopening resets the inactivity clock.

Acceptance Criteria

• GOVERNANCE.md contains a new section defining the inactivity closure policy for issues and discussions.
• CONTRIBUTING.md links to or summarizes the policy in the issue lifecycle guidance.
• Policy parameters (warning period, closure threshold, exemptions) are explicit and unambiguous.

Implementation Notes

• This issue covers documentation only. Automation (stale bot, scheduled workflows) is a separate effort that should reference this policy once merged.
• Align warning language with the project's writing style conventions.