Zope.org Overview

General Questions
1. What is Zope.org?
  
  Zope.org is a website provided by Zope Corporation as a service to the global Zope community. Visitors can find all types of Zope-related information on the site including core Zope software, third-party Zope-related software, How-Tos, links to external Zope-related resources, and more.
2. Who owns Zope.org?
  
  Zope.org is owned by Zope Corporation.
3. Who operates Zope.org?
  
  Zope Corporation is the primary operator of the Zope.org site and pays for all of its operating costs. Zope Corporation relies as well, on generous contributions of time from members of the global Zope community. These volunteer Zope.org community members are organized into Working Groups that focus on specific responsibilities to maintain the site.
4. How can I participate on Zope.org?
  
  Read about the different Working Groups that operate the Zope.org website and compare their responsibilities with your specific skills and desires. Once you've found a Working Group that suits your interests check what (if any) documents need to be signed to register as a working group member. A representative of the Working Group will then contact you about getting involved. From the time you decide to volunteer, this process should take less than two days. Please don't volunteer for more than one Working Group, unless you are confident you can manage your participation in multiple groups. It is more valuable to make steady, reliable contributions to one Working Group than ad hoc contributions to many.
  
  At times, some Working Groups will have a critical mass of volunteers. In these cases, the Working Group will keep your information on file and available and will reach out to you as the group needs additional volunteers for ongoing or special project work.
5. Does volunteering to help with Zope.org take a lot of time?
  
  Volunteering to help with Zope.org takes anywhere from 30 minutes per week to 168 hours per week. It depends on what you can afford to do! :^) We ask that while you are a member of a Working Group that you keep any commitments you make. If, at times, you can make more commitments to the group, great! If, at other times, you can't make as many commitments as you'd like, that's fine as long as you deliver on what you promised to the group. A worldwide group effort creates significant interdependencies and delays or missed milestones reverberate through the project for some time.

Operational Questions:

Who takes care of of the site?

A team of people operate and maintain the site doing everything from content maintenance to operating system patches. The Zope.Org team consists of two working groups that focus on a specific aspect or component of the clustered site.

Working Group	Responsibilities	Leader
Content	ensure that submitted articles and postings are reviewed and approved or rejected in a timely manner. provide timely feedback to contributors with respect to any material that is not approved for publication. work with the Systems working group to collect, analyze and report on interesting log-related information and publish to the community. ensure that the information architecture for zope.org is effective and useful. collect and prioritizes functional requirements from other community members. work with the Systems working group to implement new requirements provide Zope.org “product management.”	Mark Pratt
Systemss	work with Content working group to implement new features on the site. ensure that the zope software, configurations and data are backed up and, most importantly, restorable. respond to and resolve any and all software running out of /home/zope establish, publish and enforce procedures for orderly system upgrades and maintenance. respond to and resolve any monitoring alerts associated with the application servers (but not including the Zope processes). ensure that the Zope.org ZODB server is operating well, running up to date software and is monitored. respond to and resolve any monitoring alerts associated with the Zope.org storage servers.	Jim Fulton

Who takes care of the server hardware?

Zope Corporation provides the hardware, the managed hosting facility, service monitoring, bandwidth and related maintenance.
Who takes care of the systems software?

The Systems working group takes care of all software running on the Application Servers. This includes (but is not limited to) network configuration, load balancers, LDAP, any RDBMSes, operating system software, and all related patches and maintenance.
Who takes care of the Zope instances?

The Systems working group takes care of all Zope-powered software.
Who manages the content on Zope.org?

Individual members provide the content and the Content group ensures that it is reviewed on a timely basis.
Who can create content on Zope.org?

Anyone that registers for an account on the site and accepts the Site's terms and conditions can create content on zope.org.
Who decides what new features get implemented at Zope.org?

Anyone can suggest new features. New feature requests should be well specified in order to be considered. Periodically, the Content working group will review feature requests and accept, queue or reject them. Working closely with the Systems group, the Content group will refine the features for new requirements in public areas on zope.org.
Who implements these new features?

The Systems group maintains the existing software, and designs and develops new features.
Who owns these new features?

New features developed by the Systems working group will be covered by a Zope Contributor Agreement and will be released under the ZPL.

Technical Questions:
1. What kind of systems run Zope.org?
  
  Zope.org runs on commodity Intel-based hardware running Red Hat Linux version 9. Cacheing is provided by the Squid cache server and load balancing is done with the Linux Virtual Server package. ZODB fault tolerance is provided by Zope Replication Services (ZRS), a commercial product from Zope Corporation.

Legal Questions:

Do I need to sign anything to participate?

It depends on what level of involvement you want to have with the site. The following table summarizes the requirements for involvement.

Working Group	General Terms of Service	Non-Disclosure Agreement
Agreement type	Online click-through	Wet signature
Member	Yes
Content working group	Yes
Systems Working Group	Yes	Yes

Why do we need all of this legal formality?

Since the majority of Working Groups only require a “click-through” license agreement, the formality is simply to ensure that you are aware of your responsibilities in your volunteer role. Where Non-Disclosure agreements are required, it is to ensure that the people volunteering realize that they will have access to other member's data. The NDA ensures that they recognize this responsibility and are willing to live up to it. The last category involves working with Zope Corporation proprietary software, and an agreement not to distribute that code is required.
What is the intent of the General Terms and Conditions click-through agreement?

We require participants on Zope.org to abide by a reasonable set of rules to continue their participation. The need for rules and required behaviors is the result of abuses that have occurred and caused problems in the past. In some cases, they jeopardized Zope Corporation in some legal way. For example, zope.org member folders are not to be used to serve corporate/organizational websites. Zope.org member's are not to use zope.org to promulgate third-party copyrighted materials.
What is the intent of the Non-Disclosure Agreement?

Volunteers in some Working Groups will have access to member passwords, software that handles passwords, certain specific security and operating configurations whose disclosure could damage the Zope.org site. We require that people with this level of access sign a non-disclosure agreement agreeing to protect this information.
Where are the forms to fill out and where do I send them?

The forms and instructions for completing the are available at: http://www.zope.org/About/agreements/