Dear contributors, members, and community,

We were once working on TinyERP. Back then, the community was barely composed by few people and companies, the collaboration was anecdotic. Then came OpenERP. I remember discussing with Fabien and some colleagues about a collaborative platform, and Launchpad arrived. We began to share work through common repositories instead of having our own… That was the first start of our history.

In 2013, the OCA was created, just before OpenERP became Odoo and Github made its place. All of the founding members were strongly involved in the community and shared the same vision about Collaborative software development. I remember this very special day. It was in Belgium, and we had a room in the ULB (Bruxelles University). The room was crowded, I remember I was proud to see so much people believing in what we were doing.

From that point on, lots of things happened: collaboration reached another level as the OCA brough trust to and within each other, quality increased a lot, infrastructure and collaborative processes were defined. We became the first Contributor on Odoo world wide.

The future

Four years later I feel the need to write this to you, because  we are at the start of a new page in our history. The OCA has won trust thanks to our sponsors, contributors, and members. We are stronger than we have ever been.  Contributors are starting to bring real value added and complete Apps under the OCA umbrella, trusting the collaborative way of software development. This value is highlighted by the fact that Odoo SA itself announced a platform called “Odoo.sh” to allow the use of community modules in their environments.

Now, nothing is perfect. We know that some choices we’ve made had several side effects. Among them, PSC (Project Steering Commitee) are in charge of a lot of modules and due to the effect of self interest, only modules of wide interest are regularly reviewed and merged; our strict quality and review processes sound sometimes harsh to newcomers, and some contributors don’t have a great first experience. That’s about to change as lots of other matters.

I believe we can get to a new stage, where more people will push their work under the OCA umbrella. Making it easier to welcome new contributions in an incubator, lowering the barrier of entry while keeping strong quality process for stable and mature levels.

Among other points, our roadmap is about:

• Favoring innovation by defining quality levels among our contributions: incubator, stable and mature.

• Moving slowly to a “well defined maintainer by repo” setup to favor natural selection over PSC and reviewers choices.

• Issuing public RFQs to finance several projects for the sake of the OCAs goals (among them the recruitment of a General secretary).

• Bringing more visibility to our contributors and sponsors by publishing their references and work.

• Keeping quality by following guidelines, sharing knowledge, coaching people and organizing code sprints.

Thanks for being parts of this community, keep up.

Joël