Open Services

A Open Service is a public infrastructure project which purpose is to act similar to a public service/utility.

This means the service should not seek to earn profit for it's owners and/or workers, but rather be self-sustainable by receiving funding from its users, similar to a public service.

Open Services are created for the public benefit of having a open source service providing some values to it's users. Users who think the service is providing enough value to be funded, will help fund the service.

One of the first Open Services is Open-Registry, a public package registry that serves software engineers with necessary infrastructure to share code between different projects and package managers.

Other Open Services are in the Evaluating phase.

Open Services are similar to "Open Startups" but without the for-profit motive that a company has. Open Startups refers to openness and sharing of statistics publicly, but Open Services goes one step further and declares that the Open Service is explicitly not about earning profit but about providing value for all it's users and open to the community to own and contribute to.

Each open service is financed individually, to ensure that each project is self-sustainable. They share a common framework but acts for their own survival in the end. Open service is just a set of guidelines the open services use and act according to.

Framework

Open Services aims to provide a framework for running public utility like infrastructure.

The framework consists of multiple parts.

Finance

• Self-Funded
• Automatic payment of expenses from same funds
• Public history of current/past incomes/expenses
• Efficiency of received funds
• Have shutdown scenario in mind
  • What happens with existing funds?
  • How will shutdown of financial services happen?

Software Infrastructure

• Automatic infrastructure
  • Deploys on commit
• Public introspection
  • Deployment logs
  • Changelogs
• Shared secrets access
  • Guidelines for security

Governance

• Full transparency
  • Deploys
  • Metrics
  • Alerts
  • Funding
  • Expenses
• Funded/Governed/Developed by the community
  • Clear governance setup
  • Visible membership in the different projects
• Should be able to migrate to later version of framework

Product

• No backwards incompatible changes (unsure?)
  • Once something been deployed, no taking it back
• Full export functionality
• Automatic export on shutdown if possible
• Offline-first
• Compatible with the alternative services if possible
• Only focuses on one product category
• Explicit phases
  • Evaluating
  • Starting
  • Operating
  • Closing
  • Closed
• Clear start/continue/stop scenarios

The goal of a Open Service

Providing a infrastructure service to the public, in exchange for donations from the public to continue running the service.

Things that we currently have being run by private for-profit companies, should instead be provided by a non-profit oriented interest, otherwise the incentives are misaligned.