Hi all,

Firstly, thanks very much for volunteering to work on Ikasan EIP. We'll try to fill out a few more details for you.

Introduction

Mizuho International (Japanese investment bank) have open sourced parts of their middleware platform.

Although Mizuho International is the main user of Ikasan EIP at this stage, we've had some interest from other financial institutions. As such we, the original developer team, are looking for help from the community to make Ikasan EIP easier to build, deploy and use by others.

What's in it for Mizuho

In the interests of full disclosure here are a couple of motivations:

Mizuho's core interest is investment banking, not middleware development. Opening up the platform means they can benefit from other contributions that they simply don't have the capacity or expertise for. However, to be clear:

"No-one in the Ikasan EIP community that is not employed or contracted to Mizuho is obliged to work on Mizuho specific requirements in any way shape or form."

There will be lots of items in our issue register that are generic requirements and there will be plenty of suggestions from the yourselves and the rest of the community for other enhancements.

What's in it for you

Hopefully a few things:

1. Assuming Ikasan EIP moves into other institutions, people who have actively contributed to Ikasan are at a distinct advantage to offer professional services for those organisations.
2. You get to work on financial services related project with the corresponding technology and connectors.
3. You get to work with a project team that believes strongly in best practices and has a wealth of experience and expertise in middleware, we'd hope to learn off you and we hope that there is valuable knowledge you can learn from us.

Sounds big and scary, how on earth can I help?

Ikasan EIP is a fairly complex bit of software, not to mention the typical enterprise environment it runs on! However, a successful open source project needs lots of people in all sorts of roles from Developers, testers, documenters, Administrators, Graphic Designers and more. There's a whole range of roles you can take on or tasks to tackle from the very small (Spelling mistakes in the Wiki!) to the large (A new JCA connector for a trading vendor feed).

Project Organisation/Commit Access

At this stage 6 employees and/or contractors that work for Mizuho International are part or full time workers on this project. They are the current committers to the project and therefore form the 'council' that has voting power.

Any new member joining the project team whether it be from Mizuho or the community will start on the same footing, e.g. Mizuho employees will not gain committer access just because they work for Mizuho, they must show the high standard levels we'd expect from a committer before they gain access.

How to join the project team

1. Register yourself at http://www.sourceforge.net
2. Locate the ikasaneip project (http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/ikasaneip)
3. Subscribe to at least the developers list, although we have more than just developers on this project, it's the central place to discuss project work. You can also join the users and announce and jira lists as well if you like.
4. Post a message to ikasaneip-developer@lists.sourceforge.net and ask a project administrator to add you to the project, you'll need to give them your sourceforge user name.
5. When you're added, take a look at the Hosted Apps part of the http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/ikasaneip
6. You'll also want to signup to our issue register
   1. When you've signed up to the issue register then post on the developers list and ask a project administrator to give you appropriate permissions for that issue register.
7. You can optionally join Ohloh, an Open Source Project tracking site.
8. If you intend on contributing code, images, documentation etc, then you'll need to sign the Contributor License Agreement
9. Add/Edit your entry in the Team List page, of particular importance is the Timezone information!

Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have trouble with any of these steps.

What happens after that?

You should visit your appropriate section in the wiki so either Administrators, Developers, or Graphic Designers. They all have getting started guides.

Any questions, comments etc please don't hesitate to get in touch (do post to the developers mailing list in the first instance if you can so all can share in the question and answer), we're still feeling our way in how this is all going to work, so don't hesitate to pipe up!

Cheers,

Ikasan Development Team