AI and ML are areas of intense focus and experimentation across a wide range of industries, functional disciplines and operational scale. Yet the concrete expression of the work tends to be extremely organization and/or function-specific, as models are typically trained on relatively narrow and proprietary datasets.
We see a need for a community effort to:
- Open up and standardize development of models and adaptive frameworks, using and creating public datasets
- Tie together various models and data sources across the enterprise in a unified framework
- Abstract prediction and forecasting techniques that can be applied across a range of business domains
- Eventually apply AI/ML to wide-scale system analysis, using cross-correlation across different domains to intensify business intelligence and accelerate operational responsiveness.
We expect to apply these general principles first to a well-defined set of open models and practice areas, including network analysis, predictive HW/SW maintenance, and others. This will allow us to test concepts and models at global scale.
We are also focused on expanding access to the value of AI across enterprises by improving simplicity and usability of the technologies. The customer experience impact of improvements in these areas will provide opportunities to progressively expand the reach of the Enterprise Neurosystem into upstream business domains.
The Technical Committee (TC) will be responsible for all aspects of oversight relating to coordinating the technical direction of the Project, including the architecture and sub-projects needed to achieve the Mission and Scope of the Project; for approving project or system proposals (including, but not limited to, incubation, deprecation, and changes to a sub-project’s scope) in accordance with the Contribution Process and Inbound Code Review Policy to be developed, approved and maintained by the TC; coordinating TC engagement with the end-user community with respect to requirements, high level architecture, implementation experiences, use cases, etc; working with other open source or open standards communities as needed; and establishing and enforcing community norms, workflows, issuing releases, and security issue reporting policies.
The Technical Committee will require a Technical Community Leader (TCL) to drive the development of the Project, including facilitation of community contributions to Project milestones and resolution of any Community disagreements of a technical nature, eg relating to the architecture or achievement of technical milestones. The Leader will also represent the overall Technical Committee within the Steering Committee. In brief, the technical Community Leader should be an excellent project manager and diplomat in addition to possessing technical vision and skills.
For the first six months after adoption of this charter, an evaluation body of 5-7 Committers, including the TCL, will be constituted by self-nomination or nomination by other community members. Recognizing the unprecedented reach of AI and potential for harm through encoding of unconscious bias or lack of awareness of dangers faced by certain groups, the evaluation body shall be constituted with consideration for diversity across the broadest range of parameters possible.
Thereafter, Technical Community Leaders (TCLs) will be nominated or can self-nominate from among the existing Committers. The TCL will be elected by the greatest plurality for a term of 1 year by a private electronic vote of community members who have documented contributions accepted within the previous 12 months (“Voters”).
After the initial six months, a Contributor may become a Committer by a majority approval of existing Committers, and at need may be removed by majority approval of the other existing Committers. Project Contributors may request the removal of a Committer by notifying the Steering Committee, or the Committer can resign for their own reasons. The Technical Committee may add, refine and/or eliminate Technical Committee roles, as it sees fit. Expected additional roles include a Lead Architect for the overall community as well as Project Leads for individual sub-projects.
Technical participation in the Project is open to anyone so long as they abide by the terms of this document and documents referenced herein. Technical Committee meetings are conducted in English and are open to the public and documented for subsequent review. The TC generally will involve Contributors and Committers. Contributors include anyone in the Technical Community who contributes code, documentation, models or other artifacts to the Project. Committers are Contributors who have earned the ability to approve or modify (“commit”) source code, documentation or other artifacts in a project’s repository. Each sub-project will ideally have at least 2 Committers, with a strong desire for Committer diversity.
The Steering Committee is responsible for setting the strategic direction of the Project in accordance with its Mission. It provides approval and oversight of any budget and disbursements, policy documents and other legal matters, marketing, and other non-technical activities of the Project. Committee business will be conducted in English and will be documented for later review.
As a community-led open source project, the majority of work performed to develop and advance the Enterprise Neurosystem and its adoption is expected to be done by community members. This work may take the form of technical contributions as described in the Technical Committee section, as well as non-technical forms of contribution, including gathering feedback from Users, marketing, design, legal review and other activities. Where necessary expertise is not available in the community, the Project or its members may contract with commercial entities, including consultants, for incremental support.
The Steering Committee will be composed minimally of a Director, Treasurer, Operations Lead and the Technical Community Leader/CTO. The Committee may choose to admit additional members, such as a User Community representative, on either a voting or non-voting basis, under the Voting procedures described below.
The Technical Community Voters will elect a Director by private vote (greatest plurality) according to the Voting procedures listed below. The Director need not have made technical contributions, but is expected to have demonstrated consistent support for the Project in either a technical or non-technical capacity. The Director will have the following responsibilities:
- Organize and lead regular Steering Committee meetings, on a cadence to be agreed by the Committee.
- Work with the Committee to develop an annual operating plan and budget as needed and report regularly on execution to plan.
- Authorize payments to third-party vendors in accordance with the Committee-approved budget or for expenses approved by majority vote by the Committee.
- Lead Member company recruitment, with the assistance of other Steering Committee and Technical Community members.
- Regularly attend Technical Committee meetings and work closely with the Technical Community Leader to ensure ongoing alignment between the Steering Committee and Technical Community.
The Treasurer will be elected according to the same criteria and process as the Director. The Treasurer will have the following responsibilities.
- Advise on and validate operating plan’s budget.
- Review payments authorized by the Director each month, and report regularly on revenues and expenditures in relation to budget.
The Technical Community Leader’s role and selection process are described in the Technical Community section above.
The Operations Leader will have the following responsibilities:
- Oversee Project infrastructure, including internal (ie mail lists) and outbound (website and other marketing) communications tools, DevOps tools and infrastructure, Documentation tools and publication, etc.
- Document Steering Committee meetings and track SC initiatives.
- Regularly attend Technical Committee meetings to ensure community operational needs are being met.
The Committee may choose to define and formalize additional roles to assist the Director or lead particular initiatives under the Voting procedures described below.
Voting Procedures
- 1 vote per Steering Committee Voter
- Other voting members may be admitted by majority vote of existing Voters.
- If a Steering Committee Voter misses 3 meetings in a row without designating a proxy, their voting capacity will be suspended until they have attended 2 meetings in succession.
- If a Steering Committee Voter misses 4 or more meetings in a row, with or without a proxy, the Steering Committee may remove that individual and replace them with someone with greater availability.
- Elections and any other voting decisions require a quorum of 50% of voting members. Voting can be held during Committee meetings, or by electronic means within a specified time period.
Amendments to this or Policy documents require a majority vote of the Steering Committee.
The Platform is licensed under the Apache v2.0 license. Subsidiary Projects may choose other licenses, to be specified in their respective technical charters. Project documentation, web and marketing content shall be published under Creative Commons CC BY license. The Project shall develop and own all Project repositories and social media accounts, and domain name registrations created by the Project.
Title to all trade or service marks used by the Project (“Project Trademarks”) is currently held by Red Hat, Inc. In the event that the Project starts or joins an open source foundation or fiscal conservancy, Project Trademarks shall be transferred and assigned to that entity to hold on behalf of the Project. Any use of any Project Trademarks by participants in the Project or others shall be in accordance with the Trademark and Branding Policy.
The Project may seek to integrate and contribute back to other open source projects (“Upstream Projects”). In such cases, the Project will conform to all license requirements of the Upstream Projects, including dependencies, leveraged by the Project. Upstream Project code contributions not stored within the Project’s main code repositories shall comply with the contribution process and license terms for the applicable Upstream Project.
Contributors will comply with the policies adopted by the Steering Committee of Enterprise Neurosystem. These policies may include:
- Contributor requirements, including use of the Developer Certificate of Origin
- Code of Conduct and complaint process
- Terms of Use
- Trademark and Branding Policy