diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index fbbbe14916..af27065b15 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -169,6 +169,7 @@ dns-controller-push: dns-controller-image
 # --------------------------------------------------
 # development targets
 
+# See docs/development/dependencies.md
 copydeps:
 	rsync -avz _vendor/ vendor/ --delete --exclude vendor/  --exclude .git
 
diff --git a/docs/development/dependencies.md b/docs/development/dependencies.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..5e49f2b559
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/development/dependencies.md
@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+# Go dependency management in kops
+
+There is (currently) no perfect solution for dependency management in go; an "official"
+solution is planned, but in the meantime we use a solution based on git submodules.
+
+The biggest problem is the double-import problem, where a vendored dependency
+has a `vendor` directory.  There is no way to "flatten" the imports.
+
+See for example the discussion [here](https://github.com/dpw/vendetta/issues/13)
+
+## The current solution
+
+* We use git submodules to specify our dependencies.  This allows simple (if tedious) direct specification of dependencies without extra tooling.
+* We want to ignore the `vendor` directories in our dependencies though.  There is no way to do a "filtered" git submodule.
+* We therefore put the git submodules them into `_vendor`, as this is ignored by go for historical reasons.
+* We then rsync the subset of files we want into `vendor` (via `make copydeps`)
+* We commit the contents of the `vendor` directory to git
+
+## Shortcomings
+
+* We have to manually manage our dependencies (this is arguably also an advantage, in the absence of any real rules to resolve conflicts)
+* `go get` will fetch the submodules, so we pull a lot more data than we need to