Open Development Collaborations

Cognitive Cloud Open Development (ccode) provides a platform build for academia and research where Academics, Professionals and Partners can openly collaborate on projects under the MIT Open Source license. All the artifacts and code developed can therefore be shared, published and consumed AS-IS, as long as the authors a credited and cited and linked back to the main project page on open-development.org site.

IBM Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) provides high-touch collaborations with university and research. IBM Academy of Technology (now called Open Innovation Community) is an internal group of highly technical experts who volunteer their time for internal and external Open Source projects. IBM Services Asset Community helps in the ideation of research and technology initiatives into projects. Credly provides Open Badges from the IBM Watson and Cloud Academy that can be shared on social media like Linkedin. Individuals participating in the program can earn and accumulate these Micro-credentials.

The deployment architecture is based on RedHat OpenShift Community Edition (OKD) that may be deployed to multiple cloud infrastructure providers. The projects will be developed with Open Source software primarily but may integrate with licensed products if provided for development and testing for free or if partners hold the license.

Software development and volunteering for these projects will be based on only a handful of primarily Open Technologies that can be readily available and the latest market trends. Upgrades to the software stack will be done after every academic semester to stay current and not to disrupt the development during the academic period. The technology stack is subject to changes as products evolve in the future.

Open Development volunteering initiatives are yearlong efforts that are started on the beginning of June and ended at the end of July. That provides a period of 2 months, June and July to transition activities to the next initiative for the year. Since there is an overlap of 2 months, the initiatives run for 14 months. During the transition phase, the prior initiative is closed after publishing all the documentation and any stable code for Open Sourcing, and the opening to the next volunteering effort. The bottom part of the diagram shows how the timeline is synchronized with the university timelines based on semesters on most universities. For universities following a quarterly system or different timeline, the project dates and scope are adjusted accordingly.

Here’s a calendar view of the plan and how the different Sprints are correlated. The Professional developers deliver code in four Development Sprints. The Testing Sprints are also performed by professional volunteers to certify the code and automate the testing process. The testing scripts are then integrated into the DevOps pipeline for the next release. Testing Sprints are 2 months long and take the code from prior releases of the Development and University Project Sprints. Intermediate playbacks and formal presentations on the Open Table are performed for these projects.

Funding for the Open Development may be provided though various government and private collaborations. Funding may be earmarked for a specific Asset (product), a specific iteration of a component as a university project, for internship for a specific university student, fund the platform or contribute hardware or software resources for the Open Source development.