OpenCA Labs
OPENSOURCE SECURITY AND IDENTITY MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS
Labs Rules

The OpenCA projects are managed using a collaborative, consensus-based process. We basically do not have a hierarchical structure. Rather, different groups of contributors have different rights and responsibilities in the organization.

The OpenCA Labs is a meritocracy where these rights and responsibilities follow from the skills and contributions of participants. There are general members classes outlined. Individual projects define their own rules to add additional structure to their development processes.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

The Labs's Board of Directors is the OpenCA.org most important decisional forum. It is used to take decisions about the future of the OpenCA.org community. The tasks the Board are mostly non-technical related, and because of its nature only the Founders forum may decide if and when a contributor may be part of the Board or if it has to be excluded from it. The current members of the Board are:

OpenCA Community

Users

The most important participants are the people who use our software. The majority of our developers start out as users and guide their development efforts from the user's perspective. Users contribute to the OpenCA LABS projects by providing feedback to developers in the the form of bug reports and feature suggestions. As well, users participate in the OpenCA community by helping other users on mailing lists and user support forums.

Developers

A user who contributes to a project in the form of code or documentation becomes a developer. Developers usually subscribe to the project development mailing list and contribute by sending patches to the list. All developer contributions should be recognized (in CVS logs, CHANGES files, or in the source code itself, anyway it could happen that this is not reflected for every change, please if this occours contact the project manager and ask him to fix the problem). If not, please, let us know so that we can fix the problem, if some lack of credit should happen it is usually because of an error.

Core Teams

The OpenCA LABS runs several projects. All of them are related to PKI and mostly are connected to each other for some reasons. All the projects are volunteer-driven and each of them have a core group of developers with "special" rights for project management and code submission. We do not have any specific requirement for volunteers other than a strong willingness to really contribute while following the project's goal and a minimum knowledge about today's cryptography and standards.

Frequent and valuable contributers to a project are granted write access to the source code repository of the project they want to contribute to. These committers are the people who make the day-to-day decisions about what changes will be made to the software. People with commit privileges must have an @openca.org email address (that may be a forwarding address).

Administrative Roles

Directors

Individuals who have made sustained and important contributions to one or more of the foundation's projects can be invited to become Members of the OpenCA Labs. The members guide the foundation in much the same way that shareholders guide a traditional corporation. The members coordinate their activities through their mailing list and through an annual meeting (if possible). The LABS Directors Board, however, has the final word on decisions to be taken either regarding the development activities and the management aspects of every LABS projects. Each LABS Director is automatically part of the core of each project and may help each different LABS project in management and development matters.

Founders

OpenCA LABS Founders are part of the LABS Directors board and their scope is to provide a steady direction for the whole OpenCA LABS. Only LABS Founders may decide to discharge other LABS Directors by using a unanimity-based voting process.

The Labs's Founders are:

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