Webinos Whitepaper On Open Governance

Abstract

In March 2011 the webinos consortium published a deliverable titled “Industry landscape, governance, licensing and IPR frameworks”.  The purpose of this report was to assess the state of the art of technologies that will be used to realize the webinos platform, to understand related industry activities and to identify appropriate governance, licensing and IPR frameworks for webinos.  Additionally in July 2011 VisionMobile published The Open Governance Index (OGI) Report which built upon this work and introduced the Open Governance Index as a means of measuring the openness of governance in open source projects. The industry response was overwhelming with more than 7,000+ downloads and cited in over 20+online journals including IT Writing,  ZDNet, Wired News,  BGR,  MIT Technology Review,  Slash Gear,  Phandroid, ARS Technica,  Linux Today, Mobile Trends, Computer Hyper, RPMfind, Fanatics Club Linux Life, Today-Google, Open Source This and PC Pro.

It also sparked numerous tweets from industry participants including Chris DiBona, Head of Open Source Programmes at Google; Open Source Advocate Matt Asay and Mike Milinkovich, Director of Eclipse.  Discussions centred around the importance of openness and the growing importance of governance in open source projects as open source becomes more main-stream.  The OGI Report identified that the ‘open’ governance of projects such as webinos is a strength relative to the ‘closed’ governance of other projects.

Since March 2011 there has been much change within the mobile open source technology sphere and the purpose of this white-paper is to review the changes in this area since that time to determine new findings and learnings for webinos...