diff --git a/doc/source/contributor/index.rst b/doc/source/contributor/index.rst
index 3d4ceb4..f1597df 100644
--- a/doc/source/contributor/index.rst
+++ b/doc/source/contributor/index.rst
@@ -2,4 +2,29 @@
 Contributing
 ============
 
+
+Trait lifecycle policy
+======================
+
+It is the policy of this project that once registered, traits should
+never be removed, even those which will never be used by code (e.g. as
+a result of pivots in design or changes to the namespaces).
+
+The general principle behind this policy is simply that an
+extensible-only enumeration is easier to manage than one than can be
+shrunk.  One particular example concerns the need for the placement
+service to keep its database in sync with the strings in os-traits.
+Whenever a placement service sees a new version of os-traits it syncs
+up its database with the strings that are in the package, creating a
+row in the traits table, with an id that becomes a foreign key in other
+tables.  If traits could be removed, then extra clean-up code might be
+needed in several places to handle this, and this would be
+particularly error-prone when execution of that code would need to be
+correctly orchestrated across multiple projects.
+
+
+Generic instructions for contributing
+=====================================
+
+
 .. include:: ../../../CONTRIBUTING.rst