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Project Annual Review Process

Overview

The TAC will undertake an annual review of all OpenWallet Foundation projects. This annual review will include an assessment as to whether:

  • each Lab is active
  • each Growth Stage project is making adequate progress towards the Impact Stage
  • each Impact Stage project is maintaining progress to remain at the Impact Stage

Reviews will start on the yearly anniversary of the project being accepted or moving to a new stage. The review will include a set of recommendations for each project to improve and/or recommendation to move a project across stages.

Projects can be provided with an extension of time in their current stage (up to the discretion of the TAC).

The project lifecycle contains Acceptance Criteria for moving a project to a new stage.

Filing an Annual Review

OpenWallet Foundation staff will notify the project maintainers when the project review is due.

Project maintainers are responsible for agreeing between them who will complete the annual review. One of the maintainers should create the review in GitHub under openwallet-foundation/tac/docs/projects/reviews.

  • Raise a PR titled [Project name] [year] Annual Review (e.g., Amazing Project 2024 Annual Review)
  • The PR should include a file called <year>-<project name>-annual.md (e.g., 2024-amazingproj-annual.md) with the contents described below
  • Send an email to the TAC mailing list so that the community knows the PR is there and can comment on it

If your annual review is not submitted within two months of notification, we will take this as a sign that the project is not under active maintenance and the TAC is likely to decide to archive the project and move it to Emeritus status.

Success

If a project has genuinely stalled we can save everyone’s time and effort by archiving it.

Annual Review Contents

Your annual review should answer the following questions:

  • Include information about your project's contributions and activity. We will be looking for signs of consistent or increasing contribution activity. Please feel free to add commentary to add colour to the numbers and graphs we will see on Insights.
  • How many maintainers do you have, and which organisations are they from? (Feel free to link to an existing MAINTAINERS file if appropriate.)
  • What do you know about adoption, and how has this changed since your last review or since being accepted into OWF? If you can list companies that are adopters of your project, please do so. (Feel free to link to an existing ADOPTERS file if appropriate.
  • How has the project performed against its goals since the last review? (We won't penalize you if your goals changed for good reasons.)
  • What are the current goals of the project? For example, are you working on major new features? Or are you concentrating on adoption or documentation?
  • How can the OpenWallet Foundation help you achieve your upcoming goals?
  • Do you think that your project meets the criteria for another stage (see Project Lifecycle Acceptance Criteria for the different stages)?

A template has been provided for your use.

Annual Review by the TAC

Annual reviews are performed in order to check in with projects, ascertain their progress, and address any outstanding questions.

  • A TAC representative volunteers to lead the review once the project files a PR.
  • The assigned TAC member reviews the content of the PR and analyzes the project for community health indicators, their findings are placed within a thread in the private TAC channel for discussion.
    • findings should highlight important facts about the project that could influence the TACs decision around the future of the project, its current stage, and path to other stages, etc.
    • the thread should always include whether the project's view of themselves is accurate and the ask of the TAC is reasonable to assist the project moving forward.
  • The project's maintainers are invited to the public TAC meeting to engage in TAC led discussion around the project. Project maintainers are not obligated to attend.
  • The assigned TAC member provides a summary of the project and leverages the thread's content as the basis of discussion.
    • discussion typically focuses on what is going well with the project and areas to improve.
  • The project's maintainers are invited to use this time to voice any concerns and requests for help they may have that are not captured in the PR (or highlight asks within the PR).
  • At the conclusion of the public meeting, the TAC votes to approve the annual review. Should a concern be registered on a project, the vote will be held separately.
  • After the meeting wraps up, the assigned TAC member may summarize the discussion on the PR in the form of a comment to document information for the project and community.

Review Outcomes

The outcome of the annual review is either:

  • At least two-thirds of the TAC members agree to continue to sponsor the project at its current stage, or

  • If enough TAC members do not agree to continue to sponsor the project at its current stage, we will discuss with you what stage might be the appropriate next stage, including Emeritus stage.

    Info

    If the TAC members recommend moving to a new stage, additional work may be required to provide details on how the project meets the new stage's acceptance criteria.

Credits

Ideas were taken from CNCF's Sandbox Annual Review Process.