Stewardship is not the same as control: A governance charter for people who’ve been burned before.

Kiteworks steers the ownCloud roadmap. That’s a fact. We’re not a foundation. We’re not a community-governed project with elected leadership. We’re a company that owns an open source project and invests in it commercially.

The governance charter says so explicitly: „Kiteworks steers the roadmap. What we commit to is that the roadmap is public, the rationale is explained, and the community has meaningful channels to influence it.“

Most commercially-backed open source projects paper over this with vague language about „shared governance.“ Then the community discovers that „community-driven“ means „we listen but decide internally,“ and the trust fracture is worse than honesty would have been.

The charter defines four roles: Contributors (anyone who contributes), Reviewers (experienced contributors who can approve PRs), Maintainers (responsible for repo health, can merge), and the OSPO (sets policy, resolves disputes, interfaces with Kiteworks leadership). Status within community members is earned through sustained contribution, not just granted by employment or title.

We’re establishing a Community Advisory Board (CAB), launching Q4 2026. Five to nine members from external contributors, institutional users, and technology partners. Twelve-month terms. Quarterly meetings with the OSPO. Summaries published publicly. The CAB advises. It doesn’t decide. But it has a formal channel, and if we ignore its input, that’s visible.

The charter is labelled v0.1. We published it now rather than waiting because transparency about where we’re going beats silence about where we are. The community can hold us to the timeline.

Tomorrow: twelve documents, zero marketing slop.

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This is part 8 of this blog post series.
See the earlier posts:

1. A (re)-introduction to the ownCloud community
2. What happens when you fork twice, get acquired, and keep shipping anyway
3. We killed our own CLA. Here’s why that’s a good thing
4. PHP 8.3. Yes, for Classic. Yes, we heard you
5. What 108 repositories taught us about open source hygiene
6. I’m a script kid running an OSPO. That’s the point
7. Your PR was written by an AI. We don’t care. (But we do have rules.)