EPIC Governance document

Governance Document

Eclipse EPIC Component Governance

Overview

The Eclipse EPIC Component is an open source collaborative project dedicated to providing an electronic community portal that promotes the commercial adoption of Eclipse technology. It allows end users and developers to easily and quickly find quality and relevant complementary Eclipse-based technology and services.

This document describes the mission, scope, and governance for the EPIC Component.

Mission

The mission of EPIC is to provide an on-line community portal that allows developers and end users to find quality, relevant Eclipse based technologies and services. A goal of the on-line portal is that it becomes a central information repository for all Eclipse-based technologies and services. EPIC is also a service to Eclipse Foundation Member organizations to highlight and promote their Eclipse-based offerings.

Scope

EPIC will be established as a community portal for promoting complementary Eclipse-based technologies and services. The portal will allow any organizations or individual to submit information about their Eclipse based product and service. Individual users will be able to search the information to find high quality, relevant Eclipse-based technologies and services.

Individuals will also be enabled to post, via forums, reviews, wiki’s and other mechanisms, feedback and additional information on the technologies and services listed.

An important part of EPIC will be an on-line repository of products and services of Eclipse-based products. Access to this repository will be made available via a web services and/or RSS interface. This is to enable other catalog providers to source information from the EPIC repository.

Eclipse Foundation Member organizations will receive preferential treatment of their listings on EPIC. This will include the ability to post additional information, and the ability to visually highlight and feature member listings. However, the basic ability to list a product or feature will be open to any Eclipse-based product or service.

EPIC will become a part of the Eclipse Foundation web infrastructure. It will be hosted on Eclipse Foundation servers and operated on a high availability, fault tolerant architecture. EPIC will also be prominently featured throughout the eclipse.org web site.

EPIC will not engage in the following activities:

• accept payment for a product or service listed on the portal.
• collect advertising revenue for listings on the portal.
• collect e-mail addresses or maintain a mailing list of visitors to the portal.

Governance

EPIC will be governed as a component of the Phoenix project. The Component will adhere to the development process laid out in the Eclipse Technology Project Charter.

Requirement and Planning Council

To facilitate the coordination and development of EPIC, a Requirements / Planning Council (“Council”) will be formed.

The Council membership will consist of the following individuals: - 3 representatives nominated by the Eclipse Foundation Executive Director - 3 representatives nominated by the founding ‘EPIC Alliance’ - 4 representatives for the Eclipse Board of Directors Elected Add-in Provider Representatives

The Council membership will not exceed the total of 10 members regardless of the number of Add-in Provide representation. Elected Add-in Provider representatives will mutually agree to nominate the total of four representatives to the Council.

Each Council Member will have a single vote. All decisions will be decided by majority vote of the Council Members of those Council Members participating in the vote.

The leader of the Council will be elected by a majority vote of the members of the Council.

The responsibilities of the Council will be:

• Interacting with the Eclipse Add-in Provider community, EPIC users and other sources for the purpose of collecting requirements and feedback and Ensuring accurate representation.
• Producing a bi-annual Themes and Priorities document. This document should include the strategy, plans and policies for the EPIC component.
• Producing a quarterly development plan for the EPIC Component based on the Themes and Priorities which will prioritize the features and content EPIC Committers should focus their efforts on.
• Ensuring the use of open source rules of engagement as quoted in the Technology Project Charter (http://www.eclipse.org/technology/technology-charter.html): All Projects operate using open source rules of engagement: meritocracy, transparency, and open participation.  These principles work together.  Anyone can participate in a Project.  This open interaction, from answering questions to reporting bugs to making code contributions to creating designs, enables everyone to recognize and utilize the contributions.
• Conducting EPIC marketing, including evangelism, promotion, and industry events
• Protecting Intellectual Property: the Council will ensure that, as part of the transfer of EPIC, that any issues regarding GPL, content rights and the like will be resolved.

Council Member Term and Termination:

Council Members can be removed by a two-thirds majority vote of the Council if the individual is deemed to be inactive or disruptive.

Add-In Provider Council membership is renewed on April 1st to coincide with the start date of new add-in provider representatives and expires if the company is no longer an Add-In member of the Eclipse Board of Directors.

The Council will establish additional details of its governance as soon as possible after its formation. These details will clarify issues such as, but not limited to, how to replace a Council member who is removed, what constitutes a quorum for decision making, under what conditions the Council can operate with less than 10 people, and the like.

EPIC Component Committers

EPIC Committers will be the individuals that have ‘write-access’ to applicable EPIC CVS repositories. These individuals will be responsible for: 1) implementing the themes and priorities approved by the Component’s Requirements/Planning Council, 2) approving the content that is submitted to EPIC, 3) developing and modifying the code that runs EPIC, and 4) monitoring and responding to community feedback provided via bugzilla, mailing lists and newsgroups. Committers will be elected to the EPIC Component as per the normal Eclipse Committer Guidelines.