Monthly Developer Community Calls are being hosted to align the development of all Open Charging Network software components.

Anyone is invited to jointly discuss current status of development, upcoming releases, development contributions from the community, and other related topics.

Calls will take place every second Tuesday of the month via the video conferencing platform Zoom. The call will be recorded and published on this page.

Join the call via Zoom:

• Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81939801778?pwd=N3RzSHF2dEVBNXhWVE10OVZIUzcwUT09

• Meeting ID: 819 3980 1778

• Passcode: 009142

Dial by your location

Recordings of previous calls:

13.04.2021 - Watch recording on Youtube

09.03.2021 - Watch recording on Youtube

09.02.2021 - Watch recording on Youtube

12.01.2021 - Watch recording on Youtube

08.12.2020 - Watch recording on Youtube

10.11.2020 - Watch recording on Youtube

13.10.2020 - Watch recording on Youtube

08.09.2020 - Watch recording on Youtube

11.08.2020 - Watch recording on Youtube

The Open Charging Network is a community project by and for the Electric Vehicle Charging community. Its mission is to provide the EV Charging industry players an open, secure and decentralized network for digital interoperability. This is why the core components are developed open source under the Apache license Version 2.0.

The development of the Open Charging Network is driven and steered by the non-profit Energy We Foundation. Many users and community members are contributing to it in the form of feedback, raised issues, pull requests and dedicated working groups. This article should provide you with some guidance on how you can contribute to this project.

Version Management

The production-ready version of every Open Charging Network component can be found in its MASTER BRANCH

Development of each component can be found in its DEVELOP BRANCH. Pull requests should therefore generally derive from the develop branch, which will be eventually merged into the master branch to coincide with the release of a new version.

Bare in mind that new features that are big enough may warrant their own feature branch so that multiple contributors can work on them before being merged into the development branch.

Maturity Model, Feature Roadmap and Releases

• The current state of development is made transparent with a maturity model, which describes the current and planned feature set: Maturity Model, Feature Roadmap and Releases.

• Monthly Developer Community Calls are being hosted to align the development of all software components. Anyone is invited to join. Learn more about it here.

Community support

If you need support in using or contributing to the Open Charging Network, use our Stack Overflow tag.

Reporting bugs and contribute with coding

Issues are raised, described and prioritized in our repositories on GitHub.

You can contribute fixes to bugs or new features by sending pull requests via the GitHub repository. Using the GitHub UI, a pull request can be initiated from a branch in a fork of repository.

Before we can include your contributions to the Open Charging Network code, you need to give us permission. As the author of any creative work (including source code, or documentation), you control the copyright for that work. Energy Web Foundation Foundation can’t legally use your contribution unless you allow us to.

To manage this process, we use a mechanism called a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) popularized by The Linux Foundation. The DCO is a legally binding statement that asserts that you are the creator of your contribution, and that you license the work under the Apache License Version 2.0.

Please take the following steps so that we can include your work:

1. Each source file must include the following header:

Copyright 2020 Your Name or Organization>

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

2. Each commit must include your sign-off

Your sign-off certifies that you are either the author of the contribution or have the right to submit it under the Apache 2.0 license used by the Share&Charge project. The sign-off is done by adding the following line to your source code:

Signed-off-by: John Doe <john.doe@example.com>

You must use your real name. Pseudonyms or anonymous contributions are not allowed.

If you set your user.name and user.email as part of your Git configuration, you can sign your commit automatically with git commit -s.

More tips on how to sign-off your work with Git can be found on this website: DITA Open Toolkit

The full text of the DCO is:

Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1
 
By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:
 
(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
     have the right to submit it under the open source license
     indicated in the file; or
 
(b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best
     of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source
     license and I have the right under that license to submit that
     work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part
     by me, under the same open source license (unless I am
     permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated
     in the file; or
 
(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
     person who certified (a), (b) or (c) and I have not modified
     it.
 
(d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution
     are public and that a record of the contribution (including all
     personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is
     maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with
     this project or the open source license(s) involved.

The development of the Open Charging Network is steered by community needs with the non-profit Energy Web Foundation curating the development.

For this purpose, transparency about the current feature set is required, which the following OCN maturity model (inspired by ) shall provide. The maturity model and the roadmap of the Open Charging Network development is discussed quarterly during the Share&Charge Foundation and Tech Call.

The maturity model is based on different categories (columns):

• Messaging: How messages between OCN Parties are transmitted and secured

• Service interfaces: Interfaces that can be used by OCN Parties to connect their services to the OCN

• Connection & Community: Tools for the community to test and use the OCN

Maturity is indicated with different-sized black boxes or a heart:

Planned: Requirements are getting defined

Minimal: First implementations are tested

Viable: Can be used in production

Lovable: Functionality set is complete and used by community

A reference to the open source repositories is provided in parenthesis after the feature description.