The POEM process is the official mechanism for proposing, discussing, revising, and ultimately approving or rejecting all changes to the OpenMDAO project which effect its user interaction. The process involves writing, reading, and discussing documents called POEMs (proposal for OpenMDAO enhancement).

This process governs all API changes, feature additions, and feature removals to the OpenMDAO project. It is also recursive because it governs any changes to itself.

The process serves two primary and equally important purposes:

1. Announce all changes to the user interface of OpenMDAO to users of the framework before they are added to the main repository

2. Provide a mechanism for external users to propose changes to the user interface for OpenMDAO

The rules are described in the POEM_000.md document in this repository. The OpenMDAO POEMs repository (i.e. this repo) contains a full record of all POEMs submitted, starting November 1st, 2019. Both the core development team and external users participate, and input on any POEM is welcome from any user at any time.

All POEM activity is managed within this repository, via PRs and comments to those PRs. The best way to track that activity is to star and watch this repository. That way, github's built in notification system to get emails when things are changing. Github has lots of great docs on this!