TOS2CA Project Governance
This governance model aims to create an open source community that encourages transparency, contributions, and collaboration, but maintains sound technical and quality standards. Our goal is to build a community comprised of members across the TOS2CA project and beyond, including from private organizations, universities, government organizations, and international organizations.
The project follows a fairly liberal contribution model where people and/or organizations who do the most work will have the most influence on project direction. Roles determine decision making influence, and governing committees (e.g. technical steering, project steering) are set up to ensure the project's direction is in-line with requirements / goals while supporting flexibility for future growth and membership. Technical decision making will primarily be made through a "consensus-seeking" approach within the respective governing committees.
Roles
| Role | Restricted To | Description | Read/Clone | Propose Pull Request | Comment in Tickets / Discussions | Triage | Review | Commit | Technical Decisions | Project Decisions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| User | None | Anyone downloading, deploying, or operating the software to meet a specific objective. | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Contributor | None | Anyone providing input to the project, including: code, issues, documentation, graphics, etc. | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Product Managers | Stakeholders | Overall manager of project with final authority over all key decisions when consensus cannot be reached | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
User
Anyone who has downloaded, deployed, or operated a TOS2CA project repository to meet a specific objective. This project was primarily designed for detecting Earth science phenomenon and retrrieving related data, but let us know if you've found other uses for it.
Contributor
Contributors include anyone that provides input to the project. This includes code, issues, documentation, graphics, designs, or anything else that tangibly improves the project. We encourage you to start contributing right away by joining our Discussions or submitting an Issue in the appropirate TOS2CA GitHub repository.
If you are planning on making a substantial contribution to the project or feel as though you should be given write access to a repository, please send a request to Brian Knosp.
Product Managers
Overall manager of the project with final authority over all key decisions. Currently these are the orginial TOS2CA developers. They will serve as Product Manager role through July 2025 and be the final authortiy on decisions. After that time, roles for this may be reassessed.
Decision Making Process
Any community member can create an issue or comment asking the Product Managers to review something. Prior to implementing a substantial contribution, the design of that contribution should be reviewed by at least one Product Manager. If consensus-seeking fails during the review of a pull request or in design discussions, the issue will be addressed by the Product Managers to make a determination on direction.
Product Managers can nominate new members at any time. Candidates for membership tend to be contributors who have shown great dedication to the project and/or experts in a particular domain or project component. Product Managers are expected to be active contributors or members who have made significant contributions within the past 12 months.
Acknowledgements
Much of this governance model was adapted from the other notable open source projects including node.js, OpenSSL, PostgresQL, and OpenMCT. We would like to thank those projects for setting the foundation upon which this model was built.
Attribution
This CONTRIBUTING tempalate was found in the NASA-AMMOS/slim-starterkit GitHub repository.