Overview

The Consortium's activities for software development are organized into Projects. A Project regroups either development actions corresponding to one or more technical software components or the integration of different technical components in order to build a platform. Projects are the raison d'être of OW2, and without projects, OW2 just would not exist. Projects represent the fundamental activity. At OW2, everything starts with a Project.

Building on the legacy of ObjectWeb and OrientWare, OW2 is fully committed to managing open-source projects. OW2 currently covers a broad scope of infrastructure software functionality including middleware and generic applications, application platforms, persistency/database solutions, workflow engines, software engineering, etc. OW2 provides a "home" as well as a showcase to open source software projects. Each project evolves through a lifecycle described below. OW2 hosts some 100 projects.

The Technology Council is responsible for building the overall technical architecture, including defining technical guidelines, providing technology validation, making Project lifecycle decisions, and monitoring production and overall Project consistency.

Projects Lifecycle

The project lifecycle is composed of three stages: Incubation, Mature and Archive. 

New projects start in the Incubation stage, then may move to the Mature stage and, ultimately, might end up in Archive stage, depending upon periodic evaluation by the Technology Council.

The Technology Council has defined a set of criteria to evaluate migration from the Incubation to the Mature status. The Technology Council organizes regular reviews of projects to manage their lifecycle status. Deciding whether a project should move to the Archive status can be proposed by the Project Leader. Alternatively, upon observing the non-evolution of the project code base and activity over a period of time, OW2 can contact the Project Leader to propose moving the project to Archive. Note that a project in Archive still benefits from the OW2 infrastructure services, and can come back to the Incubaion or Mature status when activity resumes.

A fully executed Corporate or Strategic membership is required for a project to be moved from Incubation to Mature status. Community projects based on individual members will only be handled on a case-by-case basis. Competition will be re-assessed for moving to the Mature status.

Submitting a new project

New projects can be submitted from the project submission page.

The fully executed Individual membership of the project leader is the minimum membership requirement for a project to be accepted in incubation. For projects which are developed commercially by a company, the company is expected to get at least the OW2 Corporate Membership. The proposal is then debated on the Technology Council mailing list which evaluates its relevance for OW2 in terms of complementarities, synergies, license, support, etc. The Technology Council must reach a consensus to adopt the project. Each project must also be presented and discussed at a Technology Council meeting. Once it is provisioned in the OW2 Forge, you can start working on it. 

Project Acceptance

When a new project is submitted, the CTO starts a new thread ([discuss] Project Proposal : XXX) that links to the proposal page on the projects site. This thread should be used to discuss and comment on the proposal (before any vote).
This thread should also be used for potential mentors to volunteer. The TC should try and discuss the project proposal within 2 weeks.

When the discussion runs out, the vote for the project acceptance can start.

Vote

The vote is open for a pre-defined amount of time that has to be clearly written in the vote thread.

The vote options are +1, 0 or -1.

• +1 means I'm OK with the proposal
•  0 means I don't care
• -1 means I'm opposed to the proposal (veto)

The veto vote must be argued: we must know what is wrong and why we should stop the vote (any -1 without proper explanations will be ignored).

An option that obtains the majority+1 of casted votes will be chosen.
Ex: if there are 10 participants, the elected option must have at least 6 casted votes ( (10/2) + 1 ).

The results will be announced on the TC list as soon as possible.

Examples

The vote manager (usually CTO or TC Chairman) should start a new thread on TC list with an explicit subject: [vote] <topic>.

Example of vote mail content:

Example of result mail:

• subject [VOTE][RESULT] <topic>
• content example