Samvera Community Principles
Overview
- Samvera can ultimately be successful and sustainable in the long run only if it is an open project; that is, it takes contributions from a community of developers across many institutions to enhance and support it
- We are dedicated to maintaining a healthy climate for all community members, part of which is embodied in the Anti-Harassment Policy and the list of Samvera Community Helpers
- We will work to balance progress on Samvera codebases with open community discussion and transparent decision making as coequal goals
- All code for Samvera components is available through the Apache 2.0 open source license.
Technical Leadership
- Technical leadership of the project will be through a small group of proven developers who have demonstrated commitment to Samvera's progress and success (and have commit rights to the source code)
- Committers must be:
- technically adept
- constructive, positive members of the Samvera software community
- committed to producing useful, practical code for the community
- To become a committer, candidates must beā¦
- nominated by a current committer
- voted on and approved by a majority of the current committers
- committers may be voted out at any time by a (super?) majority of the other committers
- Before any code can be accepted, committers (and/or their institutions) must have signed a Samvera Community Intellectual Property Licensing and Ownership and lodged it with Samvera
- Committers will have a regular meeting, usually in the form of a conference call, to coordinate development & direction.
- Releases will be vetted and controlled by a designated lead or leads. These roles may shift from release to release.
Code Contributions & Principles
Please refer to the Developers section of the wiki for suggestions about how to apply these principles in your work.
- The users of, interest in, resources, and talent pool of the Samvera community will spread far beyond the developers on the committers list, and their institutions
- Samvera encourages and will facilitate taking code from contributors from many sources
- The structure of the source code management (currently using git) will facilitate incorporating and using code from many sources
- Samvera committers will actively take code contributions from non-committers and incorporate it into the code trunk
- Working code wins
- You get what you give [ Samvera Community Principles#getwhatyougive]
- All contributed code must have full test coverage before it is committed. The current testing infrastructure is RSpec for everything but Rails views, and Cucumber for for Rails views.
- Tests must be committed at the same time code is.
- All javascript features (where feasible) should be added using āprogressive enhancementā or āunobtrusive javascriptā styles. Meaning the basic feature should work without Javascript, and the JS should be added as a progressive enhancement, and added via externally linked js files, not in-line in html source as script tags, onclick attributes, etc.
- All bugs and development tasks will be tracked in JIRA
- All code must be documented before itās committed
You get what you give
- Samvera institutions commit to porting good functionality back to core. When implementing new functionality, try to do it in ways that lend themselves to re-use in other Samvera applications. When you set out to create new functionality, provision resources for contributing back.
- What to expect from the community... Where to find extra help...
New SamveraĀ applications should be posted as a publicly accessible showcase (either screencasts walking through novel features or publicly accessible demo with sample content and sample accounts with edit/admin permission)