Governance

A clearly outlined governance system is essential for the development of open source projects and for the participation in its community. Everyone is invited to offer their suggestions or contributions using the project forums.

Roles and Responsibilities

The project management involves Developers, Contributors, Project Owners and a Project Board.

Developers

Developers are people concerned with the realization of new services or applications, using already existing projects. Moreover, they report bugs, make feature requests and suggestions. Developers play the most important role within the project development, since without developers the project has no reason for existence. If you want to be a developer, just download the latest project release and use it to write new code. You can use the project forum in order to post your suggestions and to send your contribution, which will be evaluated by the Project Owner and hopefully merged in the current project version. When a developer takes part in the growth of the project source code or of its documentation, he becomes a contributor.

Contributors

Contributors are those developers who provide projects with new code, patches and/or documentation. The project owner, who regularly evaluates contributions, can decide that a developer, who has sent noticeable patches, becomes a contributor, after an interactive conversation and signing a Contributor Agreement. Engineering simply receives a "copy" of your contribution, while you retain your intellectual property and full rights on your own work.

Project Owners

Project owners are responsible for merging contributors’ patches, bug fixes, and new code in a project version. They must also make sure that the contribution is not in contrast to the build. Furthermore, project owners put new releases of SpagoWorld projects at one’s disposal through the download area. They also supply contributors with check-in privileges.
Because of organizational reasons, more than one person can embody the role of project owner. The project leader is usually also project owner, whose role is assigned by the Project Board.

Project Board

All SpagoWorld projects have one common Project Board, composed of three members. It has important duties and responsibilities. For instance, the Project Board must ensure that SpagoWorld projects reach their goals and that they are run in a fair and open manner. Moreover, it must intervene in case of disputes and grievances and it designates project owners. Finally, it can change project governance rules, according to the community growth.
The members of the current SpagoWorld Project Board are: