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6. Governance Model

6. Governance Model – Governance in the enterprise software domain of Kbase can be thought of as the development and enforcement of policies and procedures. Policies in this context can be thought of as design decisions combined with enforcement. Since a primary goal of a good architecture is to define a modular system and well-defined abstractions, choices that are made along the way in this regard need a level of enforcement. Governance starts with a vision of what the governance process will accomplish. This vision should be a collective effort of the people who will use, design, build, and pay for Kbase. Most of all, tolerance must be the social norm in the Kbase governance model.
  1. Define a tolerant governance model.
  2. Define a board of review that will be responsible for the development, maintenance, and change of policies.
  3. Develop an interoperability framework that discusses standards are the basis of interoperability and the details of these standards.
    1. An interoperability framework should list the standards that Kbase will use, point to reference information, and indicate the status of the choice (such as approved, de facto, emerging, sustained, being phased out, being phased in, etc.)
    2. A standard that has a status of 'sustained' is a special case where although a newer standard or alternative standard has been chosen, the sustained standard will be supported by Kbase.
  4. Identify centers of excellence within the community that can support governance and interoperability standards.
  5. Define different classes of participants (i.e., users, developers, committers, subproject managers) and their roles in the open Kbase development process, in governance, in project management, etc.
  6. Define a governance process that will produce policies, xml schemas, wsdl documents, ontologies, and other artifacts that must be distributed to the Kbase community of users, developers, etc.
  7. Make the products of governance searchable, versioned, and easily referenced (URI). And in many cases, make the products of governance machine-readable.
  8. How and where will we create a registry of governance artifacts? If using Netbeans or Eclipse, does a plug-in exist that links the registry to the IDE?
  9. What tools are available to automate as much of the governance process as possible?
  10. On the issue of enforcement or compliance
    1. Role of PM team to keep subprojects compliant
    2. Role of executive team to keep project compliant
    3. Link funding and compliance where possible
    4. What are the corrective actions when a part of a subsystem or system is found to be non-compliant?
    5. How are exceptions to policy handled / supported?
  11. Transition from largely independent efforts to the community working together
  12. Principles: open contribution, open development
  13. Editorial organization and process
  14. Deciding which data and data types are to be contributed (proposed by users…)
  15. Deciding which new analysis methods are to be contributed (proposed by users…)
  16. Deciding which standards to endorse (proposed by users…)
  17. How to keep the Kbase user community engaged in the software development life cycle and invested in it so they feel some ownership of success. Who are the enthusiastic communities?