License Review Tool Requirements, Candidates, and Selection
Version 7.1 by Pamela Chestek on 2019/11/30 14:44
The License Review mailing list is considering using a project management tool for public tracking of the license review process. This page is for collecting information related to this tool selection.
The License Committee recommends hiring a person to aid in the identification and implementation of a better workflow for license review. We have decided that the current email listserve is inadequate because it is exceedingly difficult to follow discussions, which reduces participation. The tasks that this person will undertake are:
- Identify an appropriate license-review vehicle with the below attributes
- Implement the vehicle on an OSI-approved host
- Create a complete, searchable database of all license-review emails, either incorporated into the tool or separate from the tool (currently emails are at at least three different urls)
The person will also be asked to:
- create a maintainable system for making machine-readable licenses available.
Requirements for license-review process
Must have
- Ability to submit a license for review
- Being able to immediately identify the current state of review for a license (eg. "approved", "rejected", "new", "being redrafted", "invalid", "rejected", etc.)
- Ability to submit updated revisions of a license, without destroying previous ones or history
- Ability to comment on a license generally
- Time-stamping of all comments and submissions
- Entirely separate discussions for each license
- Easy to learn/refresh: this will be used intensively, but for many users only once (when they submit a license) or for most, 1-2x a year (current rate of seriously discussed license submisssions)
Nice to have
- Ability to comment on specific words/lines of a given draft of license
- Ability to cross-reference a different comment in the same or different discussion
- Canonical URIs for each license for review
- Not mandatory to use the tool in order to participate in review, i.e., system integrates with an email workflow
- Low administrative overhead (OSI does not have a good track record of hosting/maintaining new services)
- Previous license review emails can be added so that all license reviews are in the same place