Projects Governance

We believe that a clearly outlined governance system is essential to the development of the open source projects and for participation in its community. We seek that the projects will increase by means of contributions of the community. We are attempting to make the governance procedures as lightweight as possible. We seek above all to invite all interested developers to take part in the enhancement of this project and seek input from all. If you have any questions, suggestions, and/or concerns, please post them on the projects Forums.

Project Management Tools

Forum and Mailing Lists

You can find the projects Forum and Mailing Lists in the OW2 Forge Site.

Everyone can use them in order to ask questions, submit suggestions, report bugs, make feature requests.

Repository SCM

SpagoWorld projects' code and documentation are available from the Source Control Management repository, based on Subversion technology. From the repository, developers and contributors can check-out the current SpagoWorld projects development version (Release Candidate x.x.x), while contributors can also update software and documentation via check-in.

Roles and Responsibilities

Basically the structure we envision is the following:

  • Developers
  • Contributors
  • Project Owners
  • Project Board

Developers

Developers are the individuals that use SpagoWorld projects technology to create new SpagoWorld projects-based services and applications. Developers are using Spago/SpagoBI, reporting bugs, making feature requests and suggestions. This is by far the most important category of people. Without developers, there is no reason for the projects. When a developer starts to contribute code or documentation patches, he becomes a contributor.

Do you want to be a developer? Download the last released version of a SpagoWorld project from the download page (or the current development version from the SCM repository) and use it to write code. You can use the Forum and the Developers List for your suggestions. You can use the Developer List to send your source code or documents. The project owner will evaluate them: he will consolidate them after validation.

Contributors

Contributors are developers who contribute patches code and/or documentation. Contributors have check-in access to the development SCM repository. Committers can directly make changes to the source base of the development branch, from which the periodic builds are made by the project owner. A developer who has sent in solid, useful patches on a project can be elevated to contributor status by the project owner via an interactive, communicative process. If you wish to become a Contributor you must sign a Contributor Agreement. It asks you for a perpetual, worldwide, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable, non-exclusive copyright license to use your contribution and every derivative work according to SpagoWorld projects licensing. This does not mean that you sign away your rights: Engineering Ingegneria Informatica simply receives a "copy" of your rights, while you retain intellectual property of your own work and can do whatever you want with it.

How to become a contributor: get the source, make some improvements or fix some bug, send that code to the Developers List and ask the project owner for commit access.

Project Owners

Each project has at least one project owner. Usually the Project Leader is also Project Owner. Each project owner has check-in permissions on the development SCM repository and is responsible for merging contributors' patches, bug fixes, and new code in the stable branch of development repository. Project owners are responsible for making sure that these contributions do not break the build.

Project owners are responsible for new releases of the SpagoWorld projects at the project download page, and for granting check-in privileges for contributors. Project owners, designated by the Project Board, must sign the Contributor Agreement.

Project Board

There is one Project Board for all the SpagoWorld projects that consists of three members elected every year in January for a one year period. The Project Board has high-level duties to ensure that the SpagoWorld projects reach theirs goals and are being run in a fair and open manner. The Board exists as a last resort to resolve disputes and grievances: every effort should be made to solve disputes at the community level before turning to the Board. The Project Board has the duty to designate the Project Owners and to change projects governance rules, if necessary, according to the community increase.

The current Project Board members are:

  • Antonio Majori
  • Gabriele Ruffatti
  • Stefano Scamuzzo