Foundation Proposal

NOTE: THIS PROPOSAL IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

Goal: Enable new usages in education and visualization through the construction of persistent 3D spaces build and deployed by a federation of organizations and users.

Discussion Notes

To accomplish the goal, we propose to create a foundation with three objectives:

• Maintain a stable distribution of the OpenSim 3D application platform
• Document best practices for the use of OpenSim in science and education
• Provide content and applications to support those best practices

We propose to establish the foundation in two stages. The first is an interim stage focused on developing a stable release of the OpenSim code base. The second stage creates the full foundation structure.

A host organization (for example, IEEE/ACM hosts ScienceSim and would be a reasonable candidate) creates a source code repository and a contributor's agreement. The agreement will cover licensing, requirements for code contribution, and development procedures. We expect licensing and contribution requirements to be similar to the policies used by OpenSim. We expect stage one to last for no longer than six months.

• Develop interim source code contributors agreement
• Create the repositories and necessary support services
• Complete development procedures documentation
• Identify individuals to fill the roles identified

We will develop a formal organization (with the appropriate legal basis) to provide infrastructure for the community and take responsibility for the source code repository. The organization will define management policies that cover financial, source code and content contributions. It will ensure that best practices are documented, and provide training and orientation material. It will host infrastructure services including content and application repositories, source code management, and basic virtual space services (e.g. identity, asset/inventory storage, and world map). The foundation may also provide training and orientation programs (which can help pay for the foundation).

In stage one, the community provides most of the engineering and document resources. In addition, the proposed development procedures identify the following roles:

• Engineering Advisory Board: Determines the set of features for bi-annual feature releases; if stage one last for one year, we expect the advisory board to be responsible for no more than two releases.
• Release Coordinator(s): Manages bi-weekly bug fix releases, packages source code and binary builds;
• Test Coordinator(s): Manages a test environment, creates and executes a suite of functionality and performance tests, documents the results
• Merge Coordinator(s): Manages the code merge between the foundation's stable release, the foundation's experimental release, and the OpenSim core development tree.

We expect IEEE/ACM to appoint an interim Engineering Advisory Board. Based on our experience with ScienceSim, the Release, Test, and Merge coordinators represent a combined total of about one FTE.

Commitments for the second stage depend entirely on the structure that is determined to be most appropriate, the balance between committed development resources (more predictable) and community development (much larger), and the balance between policy recommendation and policy enforcement.

PlanetLab is a globally distributed testbed. Participating organizations contribute resources (servers, network bandwidth, money) and receive access to a subset of the shared infrastructure. The organization includes universities, government labs, and industry. Participants agree to an “Acceptable Use Policy”. PlanetLab maintains a software distribution. And PlanetLab employs developers funded through the consortium and through government grants. PlanetLab is relevant because:

• Software license and distribution: It provides an open software distribution that anyone can pick up (whether part of PlanetLab or not)
• Development lead: There is a paid staff responsible for developing, testing and maintaining the software, and coordinating community contributions
• External funding: The organization is set up for government and industry funding; academic and non-profit participation is free
• Community standards: Participating organizations agree to a set of standards both for using the testbed and for hosting parts of it. This is similar to what we'd like to move towards for content usage