Version 2.0, Bill Snow (ON.Lab), Scott Nicholas (Linux Foundation)
Governance of the ONOS® project is intended to foster a technical meritocracy within the context of stewardship by the ONOS Chief Architect and the ON.Lab Board of Directors. ON.Lab is a nonprofit public benefit corporation, and provides engineering resources on behalf of the ONOS Project.
The goals of ONOS project governance are to:
Provide an environment that thrives on technical meritocracy. Merit is based on technical contribution, not on financial contribution.
Provide a framework for ONOS teams and projects – how they are started, how they are managed, how members are elected, how conflicts are resolved, how they are disbanded when no longer needed.
Be clear on how ONOS software evolves – how code is added to (or removed from) the project.
Be clear on how decisions are made and conflicts resolved in the community.
Make it easy for community members to participate.
Avoid bureaucracy.
The principles of ONOS governance are in line with these community values:
Serve our Customers.
Practice true Meritocracy.
Operate with Transparency.
Strive for Quality, consistently.
Value and enable Innovation.
Respect others in all Interactions.
In addition, the over-arching governance principle is To act in the best interest of the broader community.
The ONOS project is governed by four steering teams and a board of directors. The four teams are the technical steering team, the use case team, the release management team, and the community team.
The board is a group of representatives from the partner organizations. It is governed by the Chairman of the Board (the “Chairman”). The board has the following roles and responsibilities:
The board leaves all technical decisions to the technical steering team in the spirit of open source technical meritocracy practice.
The governance document for the board can be found here.
Four steering teams govern the ONOS project.
The technical steering team is responsible for all technical decisions in the project. They are responsible for the content and structure of the code base and for all technical priorities with respect to the code base. The ONOS chief architect (“Chief Architect”) is the team lead of the technical steering team. The ON.Lab board of directors reserves the right to remove and replace the Chief Architect at any time.
Email: onos-tech-steering-team@onosproject.org - Archive
The use case steering team is responsible for prioritizing the use cases that will be developed. They are responsible for the prioritization of all use cases and for all capabilities within those use cases. The use case steering team provides the customer requirements to the ONOS technical team. The use case steering team is lead by an elected representative nominated from the group of members who are customers (in this case, service providers).
Email: onos-use-case-team@onosproject.org - Archive
The release management team owns the release management process and is responsible to make sure that releases happen on time with the highest quality. The release management team owns the responsibility for determining the priority of features targeted for a particular release. The release management team lead is elected by the voting community. The ON.Lab board of directors reserves the right to approve or veto this selection, and to appoint the team lead.
Email: onos-release-team@onosproject.org - Archive
The community steering team is responsible for the care and feeding of the community. It is responsible to address community issues, to grow the community and to make sure that the community thrives. The community steering team lead is elected by the voting community. The ON.Lab board of directors reserves the right to approve or veto this selection, and to appoint the team lead.
Email: onos-community-team@onosproject.org - Archive
There are four classes of participation in the governance process. Each plays a different role in governance.
The Board is composed of a chairman and one member from ON.Lab and each partner organization. In addition, each partner may name one alternative member to attend meetings in case the primary member is unable to attend. The maximum number of partner board members is 15. Each organization may only have one member on the board. The current board is found here.
The Chairman of the Board is chosen by the Open Networking Laboratory Board of Directors. Each organization is responsible for nominating their board member. The Chairman must approve the nomination. Board members are (re) nominated/approved every year. Nominations/approvals are held in the first quarter of each calendar year. If any board member must leave before the end of their term, their organization will nominate a new member and that member must be approved by the Chairman of the Board. If the Chairman of the Board must step down, then the ON.Lab Board of Directors will select a new Chairman.
2016 Elections Process and Information can be found here.
There are three classes of voting: ON.Lab, Vendors and Service Providers. Each receives votes according to the following allocation of 100 votes. Votes may be fractional.
Chairman - 10 votes
Vendor - 40/(number of vendors)
Service Provider - 50/(number of service providers)
Should a tie occur on a vote, the Chairman of the Board will break the tie.
The technical steering team is responsible for all technical decisions having to do with the ONOS project and the ONOS core codebase (“ONOS Core”). The ONOS codebase is the software distribution represented by the ONOS trademark. Use case applications, southbound plug-ins for non-OpenFlow devices, sample applications, vendor proprietary extensions may or may not be part of the ONOS Core. It is entirely up to the technical steering team to decide what constitutes the ONOS Core. Projects within the ONOS Project follow the project lifecycle document which can be found here. The TST may amend the project lifecycle document (“Project Lifecycle”) with the approval of the Chief Architect.
As per the Project Lifecycle, incubated projects may graduate to either Mature-state or Core-state status. It is intended that threshold for having projects graduate to Mature-state will be lower and the process streamlined relative to having projects graduate to Core-state. The TST is intended to be an oversight body, and is not intended to have responsibility for patch-level project decisions.
The membership is found on the home page.
The definitive section describing technical roles can be found here. The TST, with approval of the Chief Architect, shall have authority to modify, delete and create new technical roles from time to time.
Voting member: Any contributor, a module owner, or a project owner who has submitted (and/ had accepted) or reviewed, as applicable, at least two patchsets in the prior twelve (12) months.
New technical steering team members will be elected on a yearly basis. Elections are held in the first quarter of each calendar year. At the time of election the following occurs:
If a team member leaves the team during the year, it is up to the Chief Architect to decide whether or not to hold an election to put someone else into the position before the next scheduled election.
If any member of the technical steering team changes their corporate affiliation during their tenure and, as a result, joins an organization that already has (on a consolidated basis) direct representation on the TST, the ON.Lab board of directors reserves the right to remove them from their role on the technical steering team.
The ON.Lab board of directors reserves the right to select a new Chief Architect at any time.
The Technical Steering Team may organize a technical advisory group of architects, developers, and/or other community members. Members of this group do not have to have any affiliation with the ONOS project. The goal of this group is twofold: solicit input from other experts in the field to guide the ONOS architecture and generate advocacy in the larger ecosystem for the work being done with ONOS. The people on the technical advisory group are all chosen by the Technical Steering Team.
The technical steering team will meet with the technical advisory group (if such a group is organized) 2-4 times a year.
The use case steering team is responsible for choosing and prioritizing the use cases worked on by the community.
Each service provider has one representative on the use case steering team.The current team members are found on their home page.
The team representatives are by definition the group of board members from the service providers. The lead is elected on a yearly basis by the board. How each service provider chooses their representative is outside the scope of this document. Elections are held in the first quarter of each calendar year. At the time of the election, the following will take place:
A service provider may change its representative for any reason at any time at the sole discretion of the service provider.
If the team lead must step down before an election then a special election will be called to elect a new team leader.
The Release Management team is responsible for all decisions having to do with requirements and packaging of the release components (note, one can substitute the Agile term “stories” for “requirements” - in this context it is the same thing). More specifically, they own the
Requirements database maintenance (Jira)
Requirements acceptance process
Requirements prioritization process
Release content prioritization
Release process (how subprojects get project code integrated)
Elections are held in the first quarter of each calendar year. The team lead of the release management team will be (re) elected by the voting community. During an election, the following will occur:
Anyone may volunteer to be a member of the team. It is up to the team lead to decide how large the team is and who is accepted onto the team. If you would like to volunteer for one or more of the above teams, please send an email to the email address of the team (see above).
The community steering team is responsible for the care and feeding of the community. This team will be responsible to make sure the community has what it needs to function effectively. That may include
proactively checking in with members to see what can be improved
starting projects to improve the community
providing a structured way to handle conflict in the community
making sure communication tools work well for the community
owning the on-ramp process for the community
Elections are held in the first quarter of each calendar year. The team lead of the community steering team will be (re) elected by the voting community. In an election, the following will occur:
Anyone may volunteer to be a member of the team. It is up to the team lead to decide how large the team is and who is accepted onto the team.