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Policies and Procedures

NIEMOpen is an OASIS Open Project comprising a community-driven, standards-based approach to exchanging information. NIEMOpen community governance adheres to OASIS Open Projects Governance Policy.

Overview

NIEMOpen is committed to building an open, inclusive, productive and self-governing open source community. The community is governed in accordance with OASIS Open Project Rules with the goal of defining how community should work together to achieve their goals.

NIEMOpen Standing Rules

The PGB Approved the following standing rules on 25 January 2023:

  1. NIEMOpen PGB Expert Voting Members from TSCs may be appointed by the TSCs on a rotating basis.
  2. TSC chairs are invited to attend PGB meetings in expert voting member or non-voting member status as appropriate.
  3. The PGB delegate TSCs the authority to approve TSC memberships in accordance with Open Project Rules with notification to the PGB.
  4. The PGB delegate to each TSC the authority to request the creation of new repos, and the responsibility that each repo have one or more maintainers.

Code Repositories

All code repositories are under the NIEMOpen GitHub organization that resides at https://github.com/niemopen.

Community Roles

In addition to the project leadership, important roles may be filled by community members:

  • Contributors: A Contributor is someone who has agreed to the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) and who makes regular contributions to one or more NIEMOpen projects (including but not limited to activities such as documentation, code reviews, responding to issues, participation in proposal discussions, contributing code, etc.). Any person (whether or not an OASIS member or NIEMOpen sponsor) may participate in the NIEM Open as a Contributor. The role of contributor is furthermore defined in the OASIS Open Project Rules.
  • Maintainers: A Maintainer is someone who has agreed to the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) and has been selected by the TSC to oversee one or more components of an NIEMOpen project, review code and pull requests, prepare releases, triage issues, and similar tasks. Maintainers and their requisite duties are managed by the TSC. Any person (whether or not an OASIS member or NIEMOpen sponsor) may be appointed as a project Maintainer. The role of Maintainer is furthermore defined in the OASIS Open Project Rules.

Code of Conduct

The NIEMOpen Project follows the OASIS Participants Code of Conduct.

Project Governing Board

Composition

The PGB must at all times have a chair or two co-chairs. The PGB chair or co-chairs are confirmed annually by the PGB itself via a call for nominations, and if required, a full majority vote of the PGB.

Decisions

For most decisions, the PGB operates by lazy consensus. In addition to the votes required by OASIS Open Project Rules, decisions on the following items require a full majority vote of the PGB:

  • Any action or decision that may bind the NIEMOpen project to commitments or obligations with any external party or entity, including but not limited to legal, financial, or intellectual property related commitments or obligations
  • Promoting work to an OASIS standards track
  • Starting or consuming a new project into the OCA
  • Endorsements, partnerships, or liaisons with other groups
  • Substantive changes to the Governance policies or documents
  • The TSC recall procedure

Technical Steering Committees

  • Governance of the NIEM Business Architecture Committee TSC can be found at GOVERNANCE-NBAC.
  • Governance of the NIEM Technical Architecture Committee TSC can be found at GOVERNANCE-NTAC.

Recall Procedure

Any community member may submit a request for recall of a TSC chair to the PGB at any time by submitting the request and sufficient justification to the PGB chair or co-chairs. Such requests shall be held in confidence by the PGB chair or co-chairs. In the event of receipt of such a request, the chair or co-chairs shall schedule the recall as an item for discussion at the next PGB meeting, which shall be held no later than 30 days after the receipt of the request. After subsequent discussion, the recall shall be decided upon by a full majority vote of the PGB. In the event of a recall vote passing, the TSC chair shall at that time be considered immediately recalled and be relieved of all responsibilities conferred via the position.

Incubation Process

At this time, new projects may be accepted into NIEMOpen at the sole discretion of the PGB.

Updating Governance

All substantive changes in Governance require a full majority vote of the PGB.

CLA & Non-assert signatures required

All technical contributions must be covered by a Contributor's License Agreement. This requirement allows our work to advance through OASIS standards development stages and potentially be submitted to de jure organizations such as ISO. You will get a prompt to sign this document when you submit your first pull request to a project repository, or you can sign here. If you are contributing on behalf of your employer, you must also sign the ECLA here.

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