The Outercurve Foundation—named after Microsoft’s spinoff of its open-source Codeplex Foundation—announced changes to its organizational structure to expand the size of its board and draw in more project contributors.

First, the board of directors will grow from five members to up to 12, according to an announcement from the foundation. Two seats will go to Microsoft, the founding sponsor of the foundation, and two will be held by industry thought leaders. Up to four seats will go to new corporate sponsors, and up to four additional seats will be set aside for project committers who have served one year on the organization’s technical advisory board.

The eight-member technical advisory board, which will be formed at some point next year, will be made up of gallery and project leaders, and project committers, according to the foundation. Like projects are rolled up into galleries.

Existing galleries are the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery, made up of five projects; the Systems Infrastructure and Integration Gallery (two projects); and the new Research Accelerators Gallery (one project).

The foundation also announced it will offer indemnification against patent and intellectual property infringements to all gallery managers, project leaders and committers in the same way the group indemnifies its officers, employees and agents. This would encourage contributions by removing the threat of legal action.

“We continue to evolve as an organization to support our mission of increasing participation between software companies and open-source communities, and we believe these changes will help attract the participation of additional corporate and gallery sponsors,” said Paula Hunter, the foundation’s executive director, in the news announcement.

The expansion of the board of directors to 12 seats would indicate the organization, much as the Eclipse Foundation did when it was released by IBM, is trying to do away with the impression that it is controlled by Microsoft. In an October interview with SD Times, Hunter explained that the name change from codeplex.org to Outercurve was to avoid confusion between the organization and the Microsoft-run codeplex.com open-source code forge.

THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Two Microsoft Seats
Tony Hey, corporate vice president, external research
Stephanie Davies Boesch, director of program management, developer division

Two At-Large “Thought Leader” Seats
Sam Ramji, vice president of strategy, Apigee (formerly of Microsoft)
Jim Jagielski, president, Apache Software Foundation

Four Corporate Sponsor Seats
To be filled

Four Project Committer Seats
To be filled