Untriaged backlog has no stated first-response target

[rocklambros]

What you want to tell us

Counted against the repository today:

Measure	Count
Open issues	71
Open issues labelled status:needs-triage	23
Open issues with no scope: label	19
Open issues with no labels at all	3
Open pull requests	13
Open pull requests labelled status:needs-triage	5
Total open items	84

The oldest untriaged issue is #95, filed 2026-09-10.

GOVERNANCE.md sets the minimum triage on a new issue at two labels, scope: and status:, reserves the decision labels for workstream leads and the project lead, and runs triage on the weekly call. That design is sound, and the reasoning behind it holds: requiring four decisions per issue is how a taxonomy stops getting used in month two.

The cadence is what is under pressure. Nineteen issues have not cleared the two-label minimum. Contributors who filed conformance evidence against a real harness (#109, #111, #113) are waiting on a first response, and that is the exact contribution the Current Priority Scope asks for.

Two things make the weekly cadence harder than it looks on paper:

1. Three of the nine leads named in GOVERNANCE.md hold unaccepted write invitations, so they cannot apply labels at all. Detail in Three CODEOWNERS entries are inert because the write invitations are unaccepted #144.
2. Nothing published tells a contributor when to expect a first response, so there is no shared expectation to measure against.

Asking for one of these, or both:

• State a first-triage response target in CONTRIBUTING.md. A number that gets met matters more than a short one.
• Widen who can apply the intake-stage labels. status: and scope: are the ones that unblock a contributor. priority:, workstream:, and status:accepted can stay where GOVERNANCE.md puts them.

Related but not the same: #96 covers label-strip enforcement, #97 covers the org-level board. Neither changes who can triage or how fast.