2015 involved a number of infrastructure changes at OpenNTF: servers were upgraded, we updated the website content, nginx was placed in front of our sites to add SSL support and we are in the process of rolling out various Atlassian products - Stash for source control, JIRA for issue tracking, Bamboo for automatic building of projects and Confluence for documentation, most evidently for XPages Knowledge Base, thanks for John Jardin.

But we also started thinking about the future directions for OpenNTF projects. We talked with representatives from Apache and Eclipse to learn from their very different approaches to open source. With the increasing use of GitHub, at OpenNTF we need to think about how we are different from a website that just provides source control. Previous reviews have done something to address that and also improve the quality of projects, because virtually every new project is now Apache licensed. But in the last couple of years, both OpenNTF and the communities we support have also changed. First, when OpenNTF chose to extend to the wider ICS portfolio, Niklas Heidloff helped facilitate that by Websphere Portal projects being hosted on OpenNTF. And now many XPages developers are also stepping beyond the traditional suite of products and administrators are including cloud in their portfolio. A lot is changing, so it's a good time to re-evaluate where we are, where we want to be, and what we need to do to get there.

So over the coming months we have decided to review project governance and look at what can be done to increase adoption, usefulness and quality of the projects on our site. Of course this will also include some enhancements to the project and profile areas, as well as some other initiatives. The over-arching aims of the change to project governance are (in no particular order):
        - Increase downloads of projects on OpenNTF
        - Increase quality of projects (testing and documentation)
        - Reduce wasted time in installing projects that do not work
        - Increase confidence in using OpenNTF projects
        - Enable project teams to grow as required (by project chefs and potential team members)
        - Reduce “single point of failure” with projects
        - Improve defect management and resolution, while not over-burdening project chefs
        - Still allow scope for external support contracts
        - Identify but encourage “for personal / training use only” projects
        - Enable effective sun-setting of inactive / out of date projects
        - Increase reviews of projects
        - Improve ability to find appropriate projects
        - Increase contributions
        - Increase currency and enable “archiving” of inactive users

As the first steps towards that, we would like to gather feedback from consumers and contributors, because we want to ensure that the feelings we have about OpenNTF projects, the aims we have as a board and the direction we wish to take OpenNTF is one that fits the requirements of our users - both consumers and contributors.

We would encourage as many consumers as possible to answer a short survey about OpenNTF projects.

In a couple of weeks we'll also be releasing a short survey for contributors as well. Because contributors are probably also consumers, we want to split the two.

NOTE: The survey will be available until Monday 21st March 9am GMT.

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