Principle Review Process

Operations Committee

Editorial Working Group

Technical Working Group

Outreach Working Group

OBO Foundry Organizational Roles

This page describes the process for reviewing, updating, and creating OBO Foundry Principles. Most of the steps are done by the OBO Foundry Editorial Working Group (EWG).

For the following, steps 1-5 are internal to the EWG and steps 6-7 are internal to the OBO Operations Committee.

  1. Discuss the principle during an Editorial Working Group (EWG) call.
  2. Write up proposed revisions as a GitHub issue (not a pull request).
  3. Inform the Editorial WG via email that the ticket needs discussion.
  4. Allow a two-week commenting period on the GitHub issue tracker, during which members of the EWG can suggest improvements.
  5. If necessary, discuss changes made during the commenting period and finalize the text.
  6. Once the EWG agrees on a final version, a member presents the text to the OBO Foundry Operations Committee for discussion during a meeting or via the issue tracker.
  7. Once the wording is approved by OBO Operations, a member of the EWG makes a pull request reflecting the consensus of previous discussions. Note that the pull request should be marked as ‘draft’ if it is a new principle.
  8. For new principles or major changes to existing principles, announce the proposal on the obo-discuss mailing list and the obo-community #general Slack channel and request public feedback.
  9. Allow a two-week commenting period on the pull request.
  10. If the feedback includes major changes or objections, re-discuss during an OBO Operations call and re-do any relevant steps indicated above.
  11. At the end of the commenting period, assuming no major changes are needed, a member of the EWG will merge the pull request (removing ‘draft’ status if appropriate) and thereby make the changes public.

The need for a new principle can arise when an existing principle tries to cover too much and requires splitting, or as new needs arise within the community.