Governance

Stewardship

Open Degree is built as a nonprofit commons. It is part of the eCollective family of education initiatives, alongside DIY Degree. The two are deliberately different kinds of thing:

• DIY Degree is a gamified learning engine. It accepts many teachers and course sources, helps a learner quickly find the best options and piece together a degree, and keeps them motivated while they demonstrate what they have learned.
• Open Degree is a single, free, open-source graph of concepts grown through crowdsourcing, with optional courses through it. It is offered on DIY Degree as one of the many sources a learner can choose from, on the same terms as any other platform that wants to use it.

Open Degree’s assets are licensed openly to everyone. No platform, including DIY Degree, gets exclusive rights or a say over the standard that others do not.

Licensing

Curriculum content (outcomes, including stubs, courses, assessments, credentials, and these documents) is published under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless a file says otherwise. Contributions are accepted under the same license. The site’s code will be published under an open-source license when the repository is made public.

Versioning

• The standard (the field definitions on these pages) follows semantic versioning. A breaking change to a field bumps the major version.
• Each entity carries its own version and status. The lifecycle is stub (reached for, not yet written), then draft, proposed, adopted, and eventually deprecated. Only adopted entities should be used for issuing credentials, and a credential never bundles a stub.
• A credential always references the version of the outcomes it was issued against, so a later change never silently alters what an earlier badge means.
• Supersession. When a node is replaced or merged into another, it is set to deprecated with supersededBy naming the replacement. The deprecated file stays, so every link and every credential that pointed at it still resolves and still means what it meant.

Pruning

The graph grows wherever someone reaches for a concept, so it also needs tending. Maintainers and reviewers periodically:

• Merge two nodes that describe one concept. One survives; the other is deprecated with supersededBy, its title becomes an alias on the survivor, and prerequisites are re-pointed.
• Retire a stub nobody has filled and nobody links to. A stub is a request, not a commitment.
• Split a node whose statement has grown to cover two skills.
• Deprecate a node that no longer describes something worth learning.

Every pruning decision is a public change, reviewed like any other.

Decisions

Changes are proposed publicly as pull requests or issues, reviewed by maintainers and the community, and merged when they meet the contribution rules. Maintainer roles and a formal steering process will be published as the contributor base grows. Today Open Degree has one maintainer, its owner, so the commitment below is one person’s.

Review commitment

For a pull request that proposes a change to the graph, whether a person or a partner platform’s bot opened it, a maintainer commits to:

• a first response within 7 days of the pull request opening;
• a decision within 14 days: merged, changes requested, or declined with a stated reason;
• an escalation path if 14 days pass with no decision: the proposer opens an issue in the eCollective Knowledge Graph repository (ecollective-org/knowledge-graph), and the standard’s arbiter decides.

Days are calendar days. This is a commitment about response time, not about volume. A platform that builds on Open Degree should not tie its own pace to upstream review: it may offer content that is not yet adopted, labelled as such, and only adopted nodes back credentials.