Our Foundation Identity and Boundaries

If you've taken a look at the About Us section, you've noticed that AYA defines itself as a "software foundation".

So what does it mean to be a "software foundation"?

Software foundations are non-profit organizations established to support, develop, and protect open source and free software projects.

Specifically for AYA, since we don't have official status with formal institutions, we adopt this organizational identity and remain within these boundaries in order to make sustainable "volunteers coming together when needed without a binding relationship with AYA to produce computing solutions for social benefit."

You can access the workflows that determine our working model from the Processes section. Since in the rest of this article, I will try to explain how the software foundation identity positions us and what boundaries it draws.

Formality and Volunteerism

AYA is no different from "virtual communities" on the internet, and being part of AYA is provided on a voluntary basis except in special cases. Just as people can create a "tea lovers community" on social media and join or leave it as they wish, or introduce themselves as members of that group; AYA also has a voluntary structure that individuals can adopt or reject without any formal membership, member tracking, or similar processes.

The movements and statements of our volunteers both within and outside the group entirely reflect their own perspectives and are their own responsibility. Any source other than information on AYA's official channels carries the risk of being misleading.

Scope of Our Work

As AYA, the scope of our work has always been to be a complement rather than an alternative to NGOs/authorized institutions/accredited organizations. By emphasizing the importance of reusability in the computing world, we have had no purpose other than making the solutions produced reusable anywhere in the world at any time and contributing them to the world's treasure as open source.

On these grounds, AYA is not in the role of a provider, operator, or contractor, but assigns itself the task of developing and protecting rational engineering solutions that will provide benefit.

Ownership of Solutions

AYA serves as a "harbor" for projects and project groups. By using its own recognition and network advantages, it actually provides a platform for those who want to do open source development in Turkey.

Just as,

• Projects made during a hackathon belong to the project team, but hackathon outputs and resources used during the hackathon belong to the organization,
• Projects on Docker Hub or GitHub are hosted by these platforms but the institutions are not responsible for their contents,

AYA is not in a different position. The point we focus on is removing many obstacles in front of people who want to do open source development. In this way, we bring new projects and open source volunteers to the ecosystem.

Projects and Our Portfolio

AYA aims to support projects that want to be developed on a voluntary basis by taking them into the "incubation program."

The basic criteria we expect for projects to be taken into incubation are listed in the Processes section.

Providing necessary resources to incubated projects, assisting in the development processes of projects, and ensuring these projects "graduate" after a certain period forms the basic model of AYA.

The presence and control of graduated projects on GitHub are transferred to the open software network GitHub organization. Of course, in accordance with open source development practices, it is always possible to fork any of them at any time.