Content
Legal registration of the OpenProject Foundation (OPF)
One of the main objectives of OpenProject is to create a place for open source software, driven and inspired by the users, the community and the utilization of state of the art technology. For this challenging goal, the OpenProject Foundation (OPF) wants to provide a firm basis with active support and guidance -> the vision of the OPF.
The OpenProject Foundation is incorporated as a membership-based, non-profit organisation (Verein). The legal registration of the OpenProject Foundation e.V. is now confirmed.
It is registered in Berlin, Germany, and of course the OPF is designated to the global OpenProject community.
The OPF has already started to operate according to the defined responsibilities in order to reach the desired vision and goals.
Goals of the OPF
Responsibilities of the OpenProject Foundation:
- Creating and empowering an active and open community, consisting of software engineers, users, and companies for a continuous development and improvement of OpenProject;
- Definition, improvement and implementation of the project vision, the code of conduct as well as application principles;
- Definition and implementation of development processes and guidelines as well as processes for quality improvement;
- Maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure of OpenProject.org and other corresponding sites;
- Empowering the community to participate in and contribute to the project;
- Protecting the GPL source code of the project, its community contributions as well as financial contributions;
- Organising and promoting OpenProject and communicating the benefits of the OpenProject software.
The foundation does not have any economic objectives.
Decision taking process:
The Open Project Foundation aims to ensure that:
- There is a defined process that helps people and organisations contribute to decisions regarding the community and the software. It should be clear who is responsible for any given decision, and how others might contribute to the making of it.
- Decisions regarding the OpenProject distribution and community are taken in a fair and transparent fashion.
- Necessary decisions are eventually taken, even when there is no clear consensus among the community. There is a clear path for decision taking within the OPF.
Why does an open source project need such formal structures?
One declared goal is to define responsibilities and ensure the existence of this project beyond any personal and individual motivation and commitment. Of course, any voluntary commit is absolutely necessary and appreciated very much. However, as the lifecycle of different open source projects has shown: various projects depend on a few individuals committing their code and following their very own ideas.
If those people suddenly lose interest or become occupied by different projects, the open source software is nearly sentenced to death. The OPF ensures that the project will flourish and will set new standards in project collaboration.
The Members
The OpenProject Foundation was established to define a group of members, who are experts in their fields and who feel responsible for the development of OpenProject. Individuals as well as companies who have a proven commitment to collaborative open source software development through sustained participation and contributions within OpenProject, are eligible for membership. Companies will be represented by individuals who will stand in for the interests of the company within the foundation to share ideas, exchange best practices, develop new requirements and drive forward the project and the community.
An individual or a representative of a company is awarded for membership after submitting the application form and approval by the board of directors of the OPF -> members.
How can I contribute?
Just start collaborating on openproject.org and/or Github OPF, bring in your contributions and ideas, help to answer questions, help to test and improve the software and the community. Share your experiences with OpenProject. We are looking forward to your participation.
The Boards
The desired final structure of the Boards, their members, and the shared responsibilities are displayed here. So far, the formal election of the Board of Directors of the OpenProject Foundation is already done and the elected representatives are the following:
• Directors: Marco Tesch (Deutsche Telekom) and Birthe Russmeyer (Finn GmbH)
• Treasurer: Jonas Hahn (Siemens AG)
• Cash Audit: Christoph Zierz (ZZ Media)
• Secretary: Niels Lindenthal (Finn GmbH)
The Guidelines
Like all other open source projects, everyone is invited to contribute in any way he prefers, which may be writing new code or plugins, testing, code review and so on.
One of the goals is to make these processes as transparent and understandable as possible.
Therefore the OPF will publish official guidelines for these processes. The first one, you can already find on OpenProject - it is the guideline for code review. It shall ensure that all pull requests are treated equally. They shall all be reviewed with the same thoroughness - regardless, whether it is someone’s first or 1000th pull request and are all taken seriously.
Subsequently, also different guidelines for suggesting and requesting new features and so on, will be published.
The next meeting of the OPF will be held on July 11th in Cologne, Germany. News arising will be published soon - stay tuned!
—> Read more about the OpenProject Foundation, its statutes and boards.