Open Project PGB members and OASIS members,

At its meeting on June 14, 2022, the OASIS Board of Directors approved updates to the OASIS Open Project Process as well as minor changes to the Committee Operations Process and the Open Repository Guidelines and Procedures. Staff recommended these changes to address issues raised by several projects as well as our own lessons learned. The proposals go into effect immediately.

The specific changes can be seen in the attached red-line copies of these documents. We do not anticipate these to have a significant impact on your ongoing project work.

Briefly:

1. The first (and most important) change can be found in the OP Rules at lines 121 to 137 as a proposed new section 5.7. This change would allow OP PGBs to elect to apply the same quorum, non-voting, and persistent non-voting rules that TCs enjoy to their OP operations. Several PGBs have struggled to achieve regular quorum and make progress. By adopting a Standing Rule, OPs will now be able to gracefully scale down voting and quorum to those who show up and vote regularly. As with TCs, this would not change any other commitments or privileges of Sponsorship.

2. The second change is about Technical Steering Committees (TSC), and can be found in the attached marked OP Rules at lines 70 to 78 and 142 to 152. These changes simply clarify that a project can have multiple TSCs and how TSCs are represented on the PGB.

3. At lines to 242 to 245 (Section 10), we attempt to emphasize that, generally speaking, we don't expect Open Projects to adhere to a lot of rigid formalities; they're entitled to run as a consensus process, without a lot of formal motions, seconding and Roberts Rules behaviors. Related changes on the same topic also are in the OASIS Committee Operations Process at lines 74 to 76 and 162 to 166.

4. In the Open Repository rules, which allow TCs to launch open source projects on the side, we changed the language from a list of applicable open source licenses that would require maintaining to a statement that it is the same as for the Open Project Rules. Lines 53 to 58.

5. Two other minor patches to the OASIS Committee Operations Process were approved, in addition to the "consensus" issue noted above. The first is at lines 136 to 145, where the role and requirements for "standing rules" is slightly clarified. The second is to the informative table of project roles and functions after line 56. These were made to better explain what each role in an Open Project may do.

6. Finally, as general clean-up, small, non-substantive editorial corrections were made at lines 21, 80, 84, 87, and 205 of the OP Rules, and lines 82, 83 and 99 of the OASIS Committee Operations Process.

Again, we do not expect these to have major impacts on your work but, as always, feel free to contact us with any questions.

Best regards,

/chet


Additional information

- Open Project Rules - https://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/open-projects-process/

- Committee Operations Process - https://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/oasis-committee-operations-process/

- Open Repository Guidelines and Procedures - https://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/open-repositories/
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Heads up for any of you scheduling projects with cross-ocean participants, it is that time of year. 

Open Project PGB members and OASIS members,

At its January 25, 2022 meeting, the OASIS Board of Directors approved updates to the rules governing OASIS Open Projects (https://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/open-projects-process/). Staff recommended these changes to address feedback we received from the community and our own lessons learned. The proposals go into effect immediately.

Briefly:

- Sect. 8.1 was revised to enable Project Governing Boards to adopt a standing rule delegating the power to approve and set up of new repositories to their Technical Steering Committee or to designated maintainers. In the case where a repository is being set up with an applicable license that has not been used by the project before, the PGB will be required to approve the repository.

- In Sect 15.2, Creative Commons CC0 license was changed to an implementer-class license and Community Data License Agreement v2 was added to the set of other available licenses to accommodate repositories intended for collections of data.

You can review the specific changes in the attached red-lined PDF file.

Thank you for your ongoing work at OASIS. We appreciate all that you do. As always, feel free to contact us with any questions you have.

/chet
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