Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Template contract for OpenACS projects

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18: Re: Template contract for OpenACS projects (response to 1)
Posted by Staffan Hansson on 04/11/03 04:25 PM
We seem to have reached a consensus around Peter's excellent idea of having community guidelines for professional OpenACS projects published on the OpenACS website. Would the following do the trick?

On the Contribute page we could add a section like this:

I want to conduct a professional project!

If you're a professional developer planning on extending the toolkit with new applications, you and your client might want to follow the community guidelines [link] to ensure yourselves that your project meets expected standards and receives even more appreciation.

On the Projects index page we could add an introductory text also containing a link to the guidelines. Something like:
A number of major ongoing projects are contionusly improving the OpenACS toolkit and extending it with new applications. If you're thinking about starting a new project, you should take a look at the project guidelines [link] to make sure that things go smoothly.
The guidelines could be published under /projects/guidelines and (as previously suggested) the page could read:
Community guidelines for professional OpenACS projects

PROJECT PROCESS:

  • Present project plans to the gatekeepers and wait for their go-ahead before starting.
  • Publicly announce to the community when a commercial project has started and who are involved.
  • Post continuous status reports that the community can comment on, and meet any feedback.
  • Continuously commit development code to the development branch of the OpenACS CVS tree.
  • If the project results in a new OpenACS package, write standard format documentation.
  • Publicly announce when the project is completed, and summarize what's been done and who's to thank for it.
PROJECT PRODUCT:
  • The code is released under the GPL, making it open source.
  • The copyright automatically goes to the code-developing author but may be transferred to the client.
  • The copyright holder has the primary responsibility for maintaining the code in the OpenACS environment.
Comments?
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19: Re: Template contract for OpenACS projects (response to 18)
Posted by Peter Marklund on 04/21/03 12:16 PM
Staffan,
sorry about the late reply. I like your proposal a great deal.  There are quite a few OpenACS projects (not least after the Copenhagen get-together), some of which are commercial and involve clients, and some which are not (such as volunteer improvements to OpenACS or openacs.org). It seems to me that your guidelines should apply to all these projects, not only professional ones.

My idea was to facilitate and require that every such project has a project page on openacs.org that at minimum has status updates in a blogger and a list of the people involved and some kind of roadmap/task list. For an illustration of what I had in mind, see the I18N project page:

http://www.collaboraid.biz/extranet/i18n/

I will be posting shortly to summarize ideas that were discussed during the OpenACS governance meeting in Copenhagen. The governance that we choose will influence your guidelines to some extent. We are leaning towards a governance structure similar to that of the Tcl/Tk project uses. That topic deserves its own thread.