OSI Board Report on ClearlyDefined

Monthly report in preparation for board meeting June 21, 2018

Summary

ClearlyDefined has begun to grow in resources, technology, and community. Each of these areas has had additions or growth, and we are excited to continue to facilitate that in the coming months.

Resources

Microsoft now has an intern who will be focused on ClearlyDefined for the summer. We have also received funding of $50,000 from Microsoft that is earmarked for funding more development work on the project.

Technology

Our focus has been on the contribution workflow to enable the next steps in the ClearlyDefined workflow, curation. Enabling contributions will begin to bring in pull requests into GitHub for the project. That will in turn enable curators in the community to begin to discuss how to deal with those pull requests, and then to have discussions and merge them.

We have also been leading a series of meetings about the data definitions that ClearlyDefined exposes to its end users and that data’s alignment with FOSS license obligations. We have a steering committee in place that has been weighing in on the discussion and we are nearing a solution for implementation.

Community

The data steering committee is derived from the existing community of organizations and people involved in this initiative, and it has also had the reverse effect of helping to grow the community as people learn about the steering committee.

We are also aiming to enable a curation steering committee soon with the implementation of the contribution workflow to give the curators a simple workflow to work with.

Upcoming goals

1. Seeding of the curation steering committee from the existing organizations and people who are involved or interested in this topic. Likely we will also have defined practices and protocols for how to deal with curations and begin having the curations be merged.
2. Hiring of developers to begin speeding up work and features.