[General] What is an osaf project?

[Katie Capps Parlante]

Over on the scooby and cosmo lists, folks are having a conversation 
about whether or not to merge scooby/cosmo into one project, or to keep 
the two projects and start a 3rd project (snarf) that combines the two 
into one download.

I think the conversation raises some interesting questions that we might 
discuss here on the general osaf list. In particular, how do we define 
what a "project" is?

I'll throw out a definition, based on some things that people mentioned:

* A project has its own roadmap, release schedule, and requirements planning
* A project has its own space to communicate about the project (irc 
channel, mailing list)
* A project has its own development team, or set of people who are 
coding on the project (set of committers)
* A project has its own bugzilla product
* A project has its own website/wiki starting point
* A project has its own license
* A project has its own svn repository (one or more?)
* A project may provide one or more different types of downloads
* A project has its own level of formality (more or less agile, more or 
less formal product planning)

Right now Chandler, Cosmo and Scooby operate as separate projects. 
PyICU, PyLucene, Zanshin, M2Crypto, are also all independent projects, 
with at least some of these trappings.

Across projects, we'd like to have:

* A consistent overall vision and strategy for how the projects fit together
* One design/product team to support all projects (one team to provide 
some continuity in this vision)
* One qa team to support all projects (providing more or less support to 
some projects)
* One build/release team to support all projects
* A consistent overall governance policy across projects

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Katie