OpenSocial Foundation FAQ

Owned by Mark Halvorson (Deactivated)
Last updated: Aug 17, 2012 by Mark WeitzelVersion comment
3 min read

What is the OpenSocial Foundation?
The OpenSocial Foundation is a non-profit corporation created to sustain the free and open development of OpenSocial specifications. The Foundation helps facilitate the development of new specifications and ensures that the technical direction remains in the hands of the community.

How do I get involved with OpenSocial?
There are a variety of ways to get involved with OpenSocial:

  • Get started building social apps
  • Become an "OpenSocial container" by hosting social apps
  • Contribute to the evolution of the spec (spec process)
  • Become an OpenSocial Foundation member
  • Members of the foundation are able to nominate and elect 2 community representatives for the Board of Directors.

What is the structure of the OpenSocial Foundation?
The OpenSocial Foundation is a nonprofit public benefit corporation registered in the state of California. The Foundation consists of individual members and a Board of Directors.

The officers of the foundation are:

What is the structure of the board of directors?
The board of directors consists of 7 seats as follows:

  • 5 corporate seats: The 5 corporate directors are designated by companies that are nominated and (re)elected by the outgoing board each year. The initial corporate directors are designated by: hi5, Flixster, MySpace, Google, and Yahoo!. To ensure stability in the early days of the Foundation, Yahoo!, MySpace and Google will each designate a corporate director for a bootstrapping period of 3 years.
  • 2 community seats: The 2 community representative seats are nominated and (re)elected by the entire membership each year. The community is free to nominate and vote on any foundation member as long as that individual is not employed by a company designating a corporate director.

Both corporate and community directors may serve multiple terms if reelected.

The current Board of Directors:

  • Jason Gary, IBM
  • Matt Tucker, Jive Software
  • Clint Oram, SugarCRM
  • Mark Halvorson, Community Representative
  • Evan Prodromou, Community Representative
  • Dion Hinchcliffe, Appointed Industry Expert

How is the specification managed?
Unlike most standards organizations, OpenSocial defines a specification development and release process more in line with an open source project. You can read more about the Specification Process on this wiki. If you have any questions, post a note on the specification list, or send an email to OpenSocialReleaseManager at OpenSocial.org, and the current release manager is Matt Marum (SugarCRM), will promptly reply with an answer.

Who can join as a member?
Membership is free and open to anyone. To join the Foundation, individuals must complete and submit a simple application.

What is the role of the member?
Members nominate and elect the 2 community directors each year.

Why am I being asked for my employment information?
When joining the Foundation, individuals are asked to provide their employment information. Employers typically own the intellectual property rights in works created by employees within the scope of their employment. The Foundation asks for your employment information to confirm that you and your employer are following the Foundation's intellectual property management process. Membership in the Foundation is open to anyone, but participation in specification work is limited to those individuals and companies covered by a valid intellectual property rights agreement.

How are the community directors elected?
After your membership application has been accepted by the Foundation, you're welcome to nominate individuals to represent the community on the board of directors by submitting a nomination. We'll publish the timeline for the rest of the process in the coming weeks.

What is the OpenSocial Foundation intellectual property management process?
In order to contribute to or otherwise participate in the development of a specification, you must first accept the Foundation's contribution agreement. By accepting the contribution agreement, you do two things.

  • Grant the Foundation and all third parties a Creative Commons copyright license to your contributions.
  • Affirm your good faith intent to promise not to assert any patent infringement claims against any party for making, using, selling, or distributing any product or service that implements a final specification to which you contribute.

You may then participate in the development of the specification by contributing language and ideas to the applicable specification working group. Some ongoing specification discussions can be found at http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-and-gadgets-spec/topics.

Once a specification to which you are contributing is close to final, the Foundation will request that you approve that version of the specification. Upon your receipt of the request, you must either make a patent non-assertion promise regarding that specification or withdraw from participation in the specification (and the Foundation will remove your contributions from the final specification). Once approved by all contributors, that version will become final.

For more information about IPR management, please review the complete IPR legal document. The contribution agreements are not yet available, but will be available in the coming weeks.