MORFEO is a community of open software communities specialized in platform software development projects. MORFEO’s primary objectives are to:
- Create business opportunities for systems integration
- Speed up standards adoption
- Act as a catalyst for R&D&I initiatives
- Improve open business software development productivity and quality
- Provide counselling on open source community building and project development
- Be a mark of quality and benchmark for open source software projects
MORFEO’s organizational model is the product of the official statement of implicit decisions approved by MORFEO’s founding members. It is not a closed model and can and should be modified on a case-by-case basis to adapt to the new circumstances.
MORFEO Projects
Morfeo is a project-driven open software community. Regular participation in Morfeo is through any of the projects hosted by the community. The admissible project types within the MORFEO community are:
Business Model
In this model a sponsor (organization or consortium) decides to lead an open source software project, where characteristics of the Management Committee will be:
- The sponsor will retain control over the project design and management decisions by nominating or joining the Project Management Committee.
- The sponsor leads the project from the very start and is the only one who can assign this position if it opts to drop out of the project.
- The leader reserves the right to change this model if it sees fit and again subject to the condition that it is approved by the Community’s Board of Directors.
Foundational Model
The foundational model targets project leaders that intend to maximize the contributions gained from the collaborator development community.
The foundational model is based exclusively on meritocracy as a method of government. Whereas the documentation on open software communities has already described the enormous benefits of this model, it is very important to note the possible difficulties that a company that opts for this model could come up against, which are in principle wholly related to community government:
- The project is governed entirely by a meritocracy; project leadership is not permanent and can be changed democratically.
- Being entitled to a say in and membership of the project management committee, individual developers could constitute a big enough group to become project leaders on their account, provided they get together to elect a leader and the leader is approved by the community’s board of directors.
Consortium Model
The consortium model is created for projects with representation from more than one company. The companies should reach an agreement to select the Project Manager, as well as the power sharing in the Project Management Committee. This agreement will normally be set out in a contract. The consortium should submit this contract or an organizational document summarizing the project characteristics for acceptance by MORFEO’s Board of Directors. This will be a binding agreement that should be respected by both the consortium and MORFEO, although the consortium could change the terms of the contract provided that all the parties agree and it is approved by MORFEO’s Board of Directors.
Rights
A MORFEO member project shall be entitled to:
- Use all the development tools and infrastructure offered by MORFEO
- Advice from open source software experts
- Knowledge base for developing open source business software
- Use of the MORFEO trademark under the conditions established by the Community’s Board of Directors
- Conditions of use of the software developed within MORFEO for its benefit
Duties
A MORFEO member project will be under obligation to:
- Accept the MORFEO Charter
- Comply with the general guidelines established by the Board of Directors
- Choose a model licence that entails the use of an open source software licence approved by OSI or the Morfeo Board of Directors
- Organize the project and adopt an intellectual property management model that is compatible with the basic principles of MORFEO
- Submit activity reports to the Board of Directors
- Perform at least the essential community tasks
- Attend general assembly
- Participate in arbitration boards if necessary
- …
- Collaborate on community management tasks if so required by the MORFEO Office
Participation in MORFEO
There are two ways of participating in Morfeo depending on how involved the participant is in any of the Morfeo projects:
- As a MORFEO Collaborator
- As a MORFEO Member
MORFEO Collaborator
MORFEO collaborators are users or developers of a community project that have not yet been promoted to members. Forum members can collaborate on reporting bugs, and developing documentation and code. However, their contributions have to be approved by some project member, as collaborators should not have write access to the data repository.
MORFEO Members
MORFEO members will participate actively and make a significant contribution to any of the projects making up the community of communities or collaborate significantly as advisors.
Eligible candidates for MORFEO membership are:
- Any corporation, consortium or individual leading a project and satisfying the conditions and rules set by the Community
- Participants in projects hosted by MORFEO proposed by the project Management Committee
- Relevant individuals or organizations that participate in organizational positions
To be a member of MORFEO:
- The candidate should accept and sign the MORFEO charter
- The candidate should propose a new MORFEO project or should be proposed by the manager of an existing project who should justify the candidate’s adequacy:
- Activity measures above a defined threshold (data repository analysis metrics could be used for this purpose)
- Financial collaboration with the project.
- Sponsorship or advertising support for the project.
- Consulting services.
Steady project participants should be Community members, and each project is responsible for defining the rules for such promotion, as well as for notifying the Community’s Board of Directors of who is to stand as a candidate to.
Initially, there are no costs associated with MORFEO membership.
The Community shall in no case be bound by the opinions stated by MORFEO members. This is the Director’s and the Community’s Board of Directors’ responsibility. Any other member who wishes to make a statement on behalf of MORFEO should first seek authorization from the Board of Directors. MORFEO members shall only be entitled to use the name of the community subject to express permission. Breach of this rule is a possible ground for expulsion from MORFEO.
Acceptance process
- If a non-member organization proposes a project, its membership will be approved when the project is approved by the MORFEO Board of Directors
- Community membership will have to be approved by the MORFEO Board of Directors at the initiative of the Community’s Board of Directors or at the proposal of a Project Manager.
- Before approving membership of MORFEO, MORFEO’s Board of Directors will publish the candidature, opening a period in which any MORFEO member shall be entitled to object to the nomination.
- At the end of this period, the Board of Directors will make a decision on the candidature. As of when the candidate is accepted, it shall be entitled to publicize its membership of MORFEO under the terms agreed by both parties and defined by MORFEO.
Deregistration
The project membership conditions shall be defined exclusively internally. However, MORFEO’s Board of Directors decides when a member has to give up community membership.
The following shall be grounds for expulsion from MORFEO:
- Express request by the member
- Non-fulfilment of the commended functions
- Breach of any of the MORFEO Charter principles
- Participation in no organizational position or project. To this end, MORFEO’s Board of Directors shall regularly receive each project’s active members accounts from each Project Management Committee.
