Project Governance

Last modified by Vincent Massol on 2023/03/21 14:29

The XWiki open source project is governed by its Committers. All important rules are decided by the XWiki committers, for the sake of the XWiki project and its community.

In essence the XWiki project is a meritocracy. It's not an autocracy and it's not a democracy:

  • Democracy: Everyone's POV is equally valued
  • Autocracy: A leader leads and the others follow
  • Meritocracy: The best ideas win out and do-ers get to lead

Definitions

Sponsoring Company
A company bringing substantial participation to the XWiki open source project. In order to ensure this, we require that the company/individual have at least one active Committer in the XWiki Core Dev Team (i.e. not including XWiki Contrib). The notion of active is defined in the Committership page. Sponsoring companies are listed on the Supporters page.
Top Sponsoring Company
The company bringing the largest participation to the XWiki open source project. In order to keep this simple, this is the company having the most active committers in the XWiki Core Dev Team (i.e. not including XWiki Contrib).

Governance

Here are the rules related to the XWiki.org Governance that the XWiki project follows:

  • XWiki.org is controlled by the XWiki committers. This means that important changes brought to it should be discussed/voted on the list, using the same practices as for code commits.
  • XWiki.org is open in edit mode to all external contributors (and XWiki committers monitor it to remove spam, fix problems, do gardening, etc)
  • We allow listing commercial offerings in various zones, where Sponsoring Companies can advertise their services/packages related to the XWiki project:
    • On the download/hosted pages (for "business" packages, subscriptions, hosting, could offerings) or with a "Products" tab in some top level horizontal navigation to differentiate "Projects" (i.e. community) from "Products" (commercial offerings)
    • On the support page (for services: support, consulting)
  • The Top Sponsoring company is allowed to gather download form email addresses from users interested in being contacted by "the makers of XWiki". The Top Sponsoring company receives those emails and redistribute them to other sponsoring companies if they can justify a minimum level of sponsoring, which is currently defined at 3 active committers in the XWiki Core Dev Team.
  • We allow sponsoring companies to advertise services and offers in the XWiki runtime, in a non-intrusive way, including offering ways for users to register to some business-oriented services (such as sending their email address to be contacted by the "Makers of XWiki"). Similarly as above, the Top Sponsoring company will receive those email addresses and redistribute them to other sponsoring companies if they can justify a minimum level of sponsoring, which is currently defined at 3 active committers in the XWiki Core Dev Team.
  • The Top Sponsoring Company gets the main visibility in those various zones and other Sponsoring Companies get links to them. The idea is to proportion the visibility so that the biggest contributor gets the top spot.
  • XWiki.org should always remain a site for the XWiki open source community and we should always be careful that it never becomes too "corporate" since it's a site done by the Community and for the Community.
  • Contributors are rewarded for their contributions in commit messages and by being listed in the Hall of Fame.
  • Allow Sponsoring companies creating XWiki to publish blog entries to present new offers/services/extensions. Since we don't want this to turn into spam, the rule is no more than 1 such blog entry/mail per month to start with and those entries must to be presented in a nice community-oriented way.
  • Allow the Top Sponsoring company to create a monthly newsletter sent to the users list, gathering news about the xwiki ecosystem in general (product news, events, new offers/services/paying extensions, tips, etc). There could also be surveys. The Top Sponsoring company is encouraged to gather such news from other sponsoring companies to include them in the newsletter. The idea is to let the community be more aware of all news that exists be them free or for pay, and in addition also advertise conferences at which xwiki is represented, etc.
  • Allow displaying the xwiki.org blog in the XWiki runtime.
  • extensions.xwiki.org is an extension repository for free and open source extensions only.
  • Sponsoring Companies can have their own extension repository defined in the default XWiki configuration (in xwiki.properties). To qualify, a Sponsoring Company must have at least 3 active committers to be able to have their stores listed by default in the XWiki config. The same is true for nexus.xwiki.org.
  • Allow the top sponsoring company (TSC) an advertising space on the home page of extensions.xwiki.org to advertise extensions it wishes to promote.
  • Allow the top sponsoring company (TSC) to provide its news source by default in XS, for the "What's New" feature, provided that the news in it are globally interesting to the XWiki community and presented in a nice community-oriented way.
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