Governance

OSCAF is governed by the members it serves. It is open to all types of organisations and individuals (see separate membership section below). Its governance structure consists of Associated and Full Members, the General Assembly, the Board of Directors (BOD) and the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

OSCAF is an open-membership organisation adopting different levels of membership that are outlined in the -> section below.

General Assembly
The General Assembly (GA) is a member council of the entire membership and is held on a regular basis at least once a year. It consists of all members and deals with organisational matters first. Organisational members designate one representative. The council operates on a one-vote-per-member basis. Members (or members' representatives) come from many types and sizes of organisation, bringing different perspectives to the Members Council. The general meeting elects the Board of Directors.

Specific proceedings at General Assemblies are described in detail in the Articles of Association according to Irish law, such as: participants, agenda, decision making and voting, quorum of members, chairman, elections, place of meeting, etc..

Board of Directors
The Board of Directors (BoD) including the CEO, the ultimate legal authority within the organisation, is composed of 3 representatives elected from OSCAF Members. The BoD charters Plenary Bodies and is responsible for the direction and fiscal health of the OSCAF. It represents the OSCAF to the public and to the member organisations. At the end of the Technology Adoption Process, a vote of the BoD changes the status of a document from submission to official OSCAF specification.

The Board of Directors (BoD) appoints the CEO. It meets at least once annually. The directors have overlapping periods of duty to ensure continuity. According to Irish law at least one of the directors has to be resident in Ireland.

CEO
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is responsible for the operating of the daily business, coordinates the work and activities of the OSCA Foundation, and provides the yearly budget plans. The CEO also presents and represents the OSCA Foundation to the outside world, and chairs the General Assembly. The CEO is contracted by the Board of Directors and is a member of the Board of Directors. If appropriate (e.g. increased capacity) the BoD may create an Executive Committee consisting of two or more executives.

Optionally, the Board of Directors may appoint and be supported by an Advisory Committee (AC), which reviews all important recommendations, suggestions for groups, changes to the process. Each member organisation has one seat in the Advisory Committee. The role is decision making and reviewing. The director may be part of the AC.

Mailing lists

A mailing list server (Mailman) has been set up by Sven Ruby in order to provide this feature to Oscaf. It serves as showcase and has no active list so far. But members can make use of it when needed:
 

• http://lists.oscaf.org/mailman/listinfo

 

Processes and procedures

Generally, members are encouraged to communicate with each other, fostering partnerships and cooperations in the emerging markets of semantic collaboration products.
Technical discussions, initiatives, standardisation efforts and decisions are made in OSCAF groups in order to fulfil its objectives, namely:

• working groups (WG) work on recommendations for standards, publications, and other topics within the scope of the foundation. WGs are the cornerstones of OSCAF's regular work.
• interest groups connect members with the same interest and work on a topic
• coordination groups coordinate between groups, BoD and TAG. This role is not needed in the beginning as the TAG takes the role of the coordination group.

Each group has the roles of a chair, members, and an OSCAF contact person who is responsible to communicate between the group and OSCAF. Chair and contact roles have to be taken by different persons.
Writing of recommendations is done by employees of the member organisations. The recommendations may be submitted to and published by existing standards bodies. Published recommendations and ontologies are subject to discussion and will be maintained, documented and improved.
Recommendations are accompanied by open-source reference implementations of the core services, allowing verification of the applicability of standards and the creation of products based on these standards. A registry of implementations of the standards and compatible products will be maintained.
A counterbalance to the Groups and the Board of Directors is the Technical Architecture Group (TAG), which is limited to technical issues about semantic collaboration architecture and ontologies. The TAG consists of 10 elected or appointed participants (for two years each) and a Chair. The role of the chair can be the same as the role of the director.
Workshops: apart from annual General Meetings which deal with organisational matters first, OSCAF organises several workshop meetings each year to bring Members and Public together for an exchange of ideas about certain technologies or policies.
Web portal: the Foundation manages a website ("www.oscaf.org", see above) for community and collaboration purposes. Part of this website hosts published ontologies, recommendations and documentation.
Venues: meetings of groups, councils and boards are typically hosted by one of the OSCAF members (alternating) and located at one of their office sites.
Invited Experts: this role may be filled by non-members of OSCAF, thus enabling direct collaboration without unnecessary hurdles. Conversely, individuals who are experts in a field may ask a Working Group Chair to be invited to join a Working Group as an Invited Expert.