BioPAX Governance

''Draft; candidate for endorsement. /Annotation of this page. /Discussion of this page.''

In the following, group means the BioPAX working group.

Membership

Membership in the group is open to all interested parties.

Open Source

Open source licenses that are academic and corporate friendly are used for all work created by the group.

Decision Making

Decisions are made for the BioPAX project either directly by the group, or by an entity (committee or individual) to which the group has delegated limited decision-making authority.

To simplify the following, decisions made in either of these two ways will both be considered to be decisions made by the group.

Decisions made directly by the members are made by consensus at telephone conferences and face-to-face meetings. (For brevity, meetings at which direct decisions may be taken will be called simply "meetings".) Decisions at meetings are made by those attending, with proxies allowed. Consensus is essentially unanimity, but implies a commitment on everyone's part to respond to issues and iterate until agreement is reached.

Conduct of Meetings

Meetings will be announced on biopax-discuss with a minimum of one week lead time. Announcements will include a link to an agenda.

Any important issues must be listed on a meeting's agenda with a minimum of one week lead time so that members have time to plan to attend or send a proxy to meetings that raise issues that they care about.

Decisions must be recorded in the BioPAX wiki and a link sent to the biopax-discuss list.

External Representation of the Group

The group decides how it is to be represented externally, including (but not limited to) representations in presentations, proposals, and web pages.

A public BioPAX wiki page or web page can be proposed for endorsement by the group. By deciding to endorse a page, the group agrees that the page speaks for the group.

Endorsement of a page occurs at a meeting. The endorsement request must be placed on the meeting's agenda with a minimum of one week lead time.