Community Member Roles

Jcorporate's emphasis is building products based on open standards; and offering source code reflects our commitment to giving our customers an open solution. Jcorporate provides a comprehensive infrastructure to enable collaboration between the community of customers, developers, and our staff on both our open source and commercial source products to ensure the product continues to meet your expanding needs in the future. The roles and responsibilities that people can assume in the collaborative process are based on contributions made. You benefit from the collaborative process that ensures a product that continues to meet your needs.

Introduction

As volunteer-based projects, the community needs dedicated volunteers who can work on software and documentation. Jcorporate provides the promotional, administrative and infrastructure structure. Our projects are operated by consensus with project feature direction governed by the community process. In order to become a contributor member you must first actively contribute to one or more of the our collaborative projects. New candidates for membership are nominated by an existing contributor member.

Developers test the various pieces of software, in various environments, and track, report, reproduce, isolate, and fix problems reported. This typically happens in the process of the person using the project for their own needs! A win/win community process. In the process of improving the project for your own needs developers can improve it for all by contributing back the changes.

Not a software developer? Don't worry, there are plenty of other ways you can contribute. Organizing local user groups, volunteering to work on user conferences, and helping less experienced users on the various on-line forums are all ways in which you can contribute to the open source projects. Below we outline some of the roles of the contributors:

User Members

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 projects by providing feedback to developers in the the form of bug reports and feature suggestions. As well, users participate in the community by helping other users on mailing lists and user support forums. Often their perspectives, experiences and comments get reflected in improvements to the documentation.

We strongly encourage users providing feedback, reporting bugs and making feature requests, as well as feedback and enhancements on the documentation. Users may also be in other roles as appropriate. For example, a user who contributes ideas and documentation towards enhancing a product could be a contributor as well since all contributors are users.

Contributors

A user who contributes to a project in the form of code or documentation becomes a Contibutor. Contributors usually subscribe to the open source mailing list, project development forum, 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).

In the process of using the software, customers' users and developers test software, in a diversity of environments, track, reproduce, isolate, report and may even fix problems reported and often contribute the code back. Contributing code enables you to have the benefit of the whole community testing and improving the contributed code. So not only does this enhance the overall product, but the code review process ends up improving newly added features as well.  So your in-house system also remains a standard release for easier updates.

The sum of the each community members is greater than the whole, because with collaborative synergy, ideas build on one another. Having made some contributions, customers may have their name added to the list of contributors to promote their company and services.

Major Contributor Members

Developers and contributors who have given frequent and valuable contributions to a project and have been nominated to that of a major contributor and are granted write access to the source code repository. This role entitles the member to:

• write access account to the source code repository
• influences decision on the future of the project
• write access to HelpDesk, Task Lisk and other project resources
• online acknowledgements and linksto promote their company and services
• any commercial product available at a 30% discount.

The major contributor contact us with a proposal of specified feature development to receive a copy of another commercial source product for their own use.

Major Contributors who frequently participate with valuable contributions may have their status nominated to that of a "Core Member" by the PMC. A Major Contributor that has been inactive for 6 months or more may lose his or her status as a Major Contributor.

Core Project Management Committee (PMC)

The PMC is the governing body of core members who frequently participate with valuable contributions. These members are the official governing body of a project and are responsible for all product direction decisions as a cohesive group for a particular project. The Project Management Committee (PMC) is the group who take responsibility for the long-term direction of the project. The PMC are the people who make the day-to-day decisions about what changes will be made to the software.

The PMC are responsible for the strategic direction and success of a project. This includes coding, development plans, the alleviation of any bottlenecks, the resolution of conflicts, and the overall technical success of the project. In order to become a core member, someone in the Core must nominate the Major Contributor and there must be consensus.

The community is what makes a project successful. Open source is about the community process - the journey of getting to an end result. So there is an additional emphasis that the core developers are also responsible for the encouragement and assistance of the community. As such they're expected to not only contribute technically via code fixes, but also maintain a presence on the mail list and/or forums. When the listserv/ forums are quiet their role is to stimulate the community process. This is a differentiating point between major contributors and core developers that the core developer be interested in helping with the community.

Here is a list of benefits to the core team:

• write access to the source code repository
• product decision making
• write access to HelpDesk, Task Lisk and other project resources
• email address at www.jcorporate.com
• online acknowledgements and linksto promote their company and services
• Revenue earnings on Premium support services and product sales profit sharing
• any commercial product available at a 30% discount.
  

Lead Developer

This is the lead developer who manages the project directly and coordinates core developers working on tasks. This developer member looks at the bigger picture of happening in other open source and shared source project, market movements, and technology changes to ensure the projects remains on track.

The most important thing to remember is that a leader is not someone who stands around with a whip and tells people what to do and how to do it. A leader is someone who builds a consensus and listens to the ideas and proposals of all those he leads. When you are leading, making a decision is what you do only if you cannot build consensus and a decision needs to be made. Never act unilaterally, you will cease to be a leader, even if you still have the title.

The lead developer is also responsible for:

• overall responsible for design
• look at other open and shared source projects to possibly build on
• integrates code patches, contributions, and code submitted by community members into project
• mentors community members and encourages their involvement
• manages community process of preparing for a release, testing, and preparing release including release notes, updating documentation, and coordination with Jcorporate staff for the promotion of the release.
• stimulating the community forums and listserv when they are slow
• making sure reasonable questions not answered by the community on the listserv and forum are answered
• making the updates to the jcorporate.com site - meaning the site is the projects best implementation example and should reflect that
• participate on other listserv that answer questions and promote the use of Jcorporate's project
• provides Premium Support services to Jcorporate clients in consideration of compensation. All premium support request are initiated via the Helpdesk so as to build a knowledge base. Does not compete to take away Jcorporate revenues for providing premium support or implementation services to client directly.
• collaborates with other Jcorporate projects to ensure capatibility
• Provides demos to prospective clients if commercial project
• any Jcorporate commercial product available free for internal use after completing one release as lead developer on project; and 50% discount for third party use.

Jcorporate Site Management Committee (SMC)

While the PMC directs the project feature direction, the Jcorporate Site Management Committee oversees the day-to-day affairs of the Web Site. The SMC assist in decisions and implementation relating to direction, community building, promotion, design and project infrastructure in co-operation with the PMC team.

Corporate Sponsorship

A company may sponsor or co-partner a project or advertise on a projects summary page. More information is available at advertising Information.

If there are any other way you would like to contribute services, equipment, ideas - we would appreciate hearing from you.