We're proposing to do away with the distinction between a "project" and a "working group." To date, "project" has referred to a collaborative software development effort and "working group" has meant any other collaborative effort, e.g. a standards-making group.

But the governance procedures for the two entities have always been very similar and in our experience, the distinction has proven more confusing than useful.  

Our proposal is to collapse the two types of entities, referring to all FINOS collaborative efforts as "projects."

Projects will be subject to a single set of procedures for managing software/content repositories, voting, meetings, and all other governance processes. The only variation is that projects specifically chartered to produce standards will be subject to additional process requirements set forth in the new IP Policy that we have previously circulated.

This proposal doesn't modify nor is expected to impact any day to day operations.reflecting these proposed changes are available in the mailing list archive. 

We asking the Community for feedback. Please add your comments below before until July 14th 2019. 

Rationale

Together with the [RFC] Revised Project Lifecycle this RFC addresses:

• Governance simplification
• Clearer Messaging when onboarding new contributors

Process

• Research on comparable Foundations (Eclipse, Apache, OpenStack, LF)
• Socialization 
• FINOS to collect feedback from the Community
• If consensus, changes for approval at the Board meeting in July 17th 2019 of updated PGP, POP, Active Participation Policy, IP Policy
• Publish new updated policies at https://www.finos.org/governance
• FINOS team to work over H2 to update Wiki (Project and Working Group Lifecycles /wiki/spaces/FINOS/pages/75530756 page and all other references to WG), update governance on the website and other collateral, etc.
• FINOS team to work with PMCs to adopt new POP
• Update Active Participation policy to reflect merge of projects and working groups

Attachments

Proposed amended versions (and redlines) of Amended Program Governance Policy, Standard Program Operations Policy, Active Participation Policy are provided below and were circulated to the community@ list: