The OSA provides a unique opportunity to host all software projects that any interested individual or team proposes to develop under the Open Source terms and conditions. From five to ten most innovative and active projects will receive further support in terms of workspace, equipment, access to the Internet, as well as marketing promotion, business and software development training and consultancy provided by international experts.

The OSA projects are managed using a collaborative, consensus-based process. OSA is a meritocracy where these rights and responsibilities follow from the skills and contributions of participants.

The OSA will be managed by a Steering Committee, which will identify all Rules And Regulations and will determine the appropirate Business Model for the projects. It will also select an Expert Panel which will judge and select the winners of the Open Source Idea Contest. The Steering Committee will also determine Open Source Project Metrics to evaluate the performance of each open source project.

Project Management Structure

Users. The most important participants are the people who use our software. The majority of our developers start out as users and guide their development efforts from the user's perspective. Users contribute to the OSA projects by providing feedback to developers in the the form of bug reports and feature suggestions. As well, users participate in the OSA community by helping other users on mailing lists and user support forums.

Developers. A user who contributes to a project in the form of code or documentation becomes a developer. Developers usually subscribe to the project development mailing list and contribute by sending patches to the list. All developer contributions should be recognized (in CVS logs, CHANGES files, or in the source code itself).

Committers. Frequent and valuable contributers to a project are granted write access to the source code repository. These committers are the people who make the day-to-day decisions about what changes will be made to the software.

Project Management Committee. The Project Management Committee (PMC) is a group of committers who take responsibility for the long-term direction of the projects in their area. There is a single PMC for each project which is commissioned directly by the OSA Board of Directors. The PMC is in turn responsible for many sub-projects, each with its own group of committers.