With one exception (see box at right), changes to a given Project or Working Group's /wiki/spaces/FINOS/pages/75530756 can only be approved by the PMC of the Program that Project or Working Group is hosted within - Projects and Working Groups cannot change their own status.
However such changes are usually instigated by the Project or Working Group itself, when they request that the PMC approves a particular lifecycle change. In all cases, though especially Project's transitioning to the Released state, sufficient evidence must be provided that the PMC can be certain that the Project team or Working Group has met the requirements of the new lifecycle state.