Governance of GeoBI initiative, the open community making open source Location Intelligence adoption pervasive

The following is just a summary of the contents of the GeoBI Initiative Charter, which contains all the details.

Trust and trasparency regulate all the aspects of internal and external communications on the initiative.
However, in order to allow a more efficient operativeness, the initiative is managed acccording to a specific structure, which includes roles, responsibilities, decisional processes and the management rules of the intellectual properties.

Members

Each initiative partner:

• confirms that s/he accepts the contents of the GeoBI Initiative Charter and commits himself/herself to fulfil its provisions and rules
• spends any reasonable effort to obtain means and funds in order to open the working projects for the initiative, according to the defined working topics list, so as to obtain effective results.

Contractual/business agreement about working projects don't belong to the initiative domain and must be regulated by members out of the initiative.

Decision making process

Face-to-face and/or web meetings regulate the decisions related to the initiative life.

Each member shall be entitled to one vote on each matter submitted to a vote at a meeting of the members.

Decisions are made by consensus and, when not possible, by the vote of a majority of those present. In any decision about update of the GeoBI charter and the composition of members of the GeoBI initiative the majority must include Founding Members representatives’ vote.

Software contribution process & IPR

Technological results of the initiative (i.e.: Software code like components, APIs, connectors, etc.) are released by members in their own software projects, according to the specific project open source license. It must be released and maintained for the entire duration of the initiative under a free/open source license at least.

Intellectual Property (IP; i.e.: copyright) belong to those who have developed the software; the initiative doesn't have any IP property on the initiative results.

LGPL is the preferred license for projects joining the initiative, as we think it is a good compromise between business friendliness and software asset protection. LGPL is also the license adopted by SpagoBI and GeoReport.

Non-technological results (i.e.: documents) of the initiative are released under the Creative Commons license (preferred choice: Attribution ShareAlike).

Research results (i.e.: academic publications) of the initiative are released under the Creative Commons license (preferred choice: Attribution ShareAlike), when possible.