The MediaMosa Foundation – From innovation project to a sustainable open source community Frans Ward, Michel van de Ven In January 2013 the MediaMosa Foundation was established by SURFnet and Kennisnet. The primary goals of the foundation are to promote the use of the MediaMosa Open Source Digital Asset Management System, to bring together its international community, and facilitate the continued development of the platform. The MediaMosa Foundation owns all rights to the code, domains and trademarks of MediaMosa. The MediaMosa Foundation is governed by a three member board, which mostly plays a ceremonial role. The Board carries financial responsibility and will publish results and plans on a yearly basis. All operational activities are delegated to the Member Council, which is elected by the community members, from the community members. All persons engaging with MediaMosa and contributing to it in time, money or resources are eligible to become members of the foundation. This presentation will elaborate on the lessons learned from forming an open source foundation. What are the organisational issues that need to be addressed? What does it take to successfully commit an active open source community to a foundation? How can you address the international community members? How can you guarantee future commitments? How do you secure financial independence and assurance? This presentation will also detail how the Foundation is organised, how people can become part of it as a member, and what benefits this will bring to them and the MediaMosa project. We describe the new possibilities the foundation will bring to MediaMosa. We will make a call to action for people to join the foundation, and/or become a sponsor. Finally we will make an announcement for the first event to be organised by the MediaMosa Foundation. About MediaMosa MediaMosa is software to build a Full Featured, Webservice Oriented Media Management and Distribution platform. With MediaMosa you can build a stateoftheart, scalable Middleware Media Distribution Platform that facilitates access to, and usage of (shared) storage capacity, metadata databases, transcoding and streaming servers. The MediaMosa platform offers functionality for searching, playing, uploading, transcoding, as well as a fine granularity media access control system towards its users. MediaMosa is based on the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture and is designed to support content streaming applications by providing a backend, audio and video infrastructure. MediaMosa is developed and used by all kinds of people, organisations and companies in The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Norway, Italy, Ukraine, and the USA, amongst others.

1. The MediaMosa
Foundation
From innovation project to a sustainable
open source community
DIVERSE2013
24 June, Osnabrueck, Germany
Frans Ward - Michel van de Ven

2. About MediaMosa

3. REST based SOA
> Flexibility by combining components
> Open source and using open source components
> Scalable for future expansion

4. Can haz API?
Play video
Authentication
Authorization (Play restriction)
Upload (PUT, POST, FTP)
Transcoding
Media Management: media files,
assets and collections
Search
Jobs
Metadata and OAI/PMH
Notification
Logging and Statistics
Stills
....

5. Vehicle for innovation projects
• MediaMosa Rich Media Application
• Content Supplier Application
• MediaMosa and Matterhorn
• HTML5 Video
• Video Annotation
• Rich Media Systems Compared
• MediaMosa Building Block for
Blackboard
• MediaMosa and support for other
content
• Full text search engines
• Content in the Cloud
• MediaMosa and Open API
• Transcripting Technology
• Open Live Streaming

6. Open & Public from the start

7. Open Source is....

8. Open Source is....
“The realization of an
open source
project does not
guarantee the
creation of a community”

9. Community website & demo

10. A growing community

11. Innovation project lifecycle

12. Innovation project lifecycle
Completed?

13. What were the options?

14. Why a foundation?

15. Founded!

16. Core Activities

17. Foundation Bootstrap
• How to build an Open Source Foundation
• Parties you need to involve
• Rights / Brand / Trademark owners
• Programmers, authors, “natural" leaders
• Users
• Hire a legal counsel
• Inform on local / global laws
• Validate charter texts
• Prepare paperwork for notary
• Hire a notary
• Look at other foundations: FreeBSD, Debian

18. • Who establishes the foundation?
• Foundation name
• Goals of the foundation
• Financial sources
• Governance
• The Board (ceremonial, financial): who's on it and
what are their tasks, rights and responsibilities? How
are decisions taken? How are elections held?
• Operational Board: same questions.
• Devise rules for good and for bad times
• Who does the (financial) paperwork?
Foundation Charter

19. Member Council Charter
• This is where the action is
• Not a part of the foundation charter, but
demanded by it.
• Lay down the operationalrules within the main
charter framework
• Roles: Chair, Secretary, Master Committer, and
other important roles that emerge, like a
webmaster
• Tasks, rights and responsibilities
• How and when to do elections
• How to resolve problems and disagreements
• Foundation Board can interfere when needed

20. Foundation Governance

21. Foundation Governance

22. Foundation Governance

23. Foundation Governance

24. Foundation Governance

25. Organisation model
• Contribute with time, money or resources
• Time: write code, write documentation, take
up a Council position, organise events,
update the website.
• Money: donate for software projects, for
events.
• Resources: provide a venue for an event,
provide server capacity, provide food and
drinks.

26. Benefits
• Align your efforts with other adopters and get
more and better features in MediaMosa,
faster.
• Meet other people with similar mindsets and
problems regarding Digital Asset
Management.
• Be part of a transparent organisation with
clear goals and internal procedures.

27. • Use common sense guiding principles.
• Be honest, be open, be transparent.
• Consider every aspect from multiple
perspectives:
• What if I would have to accept these rules?
• Do these rules still work 5 years from now?
• What if we become a very large organisation?
• What if someone goes ballistic?
• Make the rules inherently modifiable and
extensible so they can grow and adapt to real-
world circumstances; but stay within charter
limits, and no self-destruction.
General Guidelines

28. Ponderings & Collateral Damage
• Things we considered but didn't include.
• Things we explicitly do not want to do.
• Do not become a financial broker between
customers and suppliers. Just be an information
broker, a linking pin.
• Do not hide information, publish everything.
• No membership fees with voting rights; would
allow commercial entities to dominate the
Council.

29. Lessons Learned
• What are the organisational issues that need
to be addressed?
• What does it take to successfully build an
active open source community?
• How can you address the international
community members?
• How can you guarantee future commitments?
• How do you secure financial independence
and assurance?

30. Call to Action
Join the community
Talk to us @Diverse
Will do BoF sessions to go into specifics
Contribute
Become a sponsor
Use MediaMosa and tell us about it
Have fun
http://foundation.mediamosa.org
<board@mediamosa.org>

31. MediaMosa Directions
WWW
http://mediamosa.org
http://foundation.mediamosa.org
Twitter
http://twitter.com/mediamosa
Online Demo
http://demo.mediamosa.org
Source Code
https://github.com/mediamosa
Slideshare
http://www.slideshare.net/mediamosa