Projects & members
A project holds everything for one product or system: its requirements artifacts, traceability links, board, agents, runs, interviews, and V&V data.
The Projects page
After signing in you land on the Projects page for the active workspace. Each project appears as a card showing its name, description, short ID, and creation date. Hovering a card reveals its action buttons:
| Icon | Action |
|---|---|
| ⧉ | Save as template — snapshot this project as a reusable template |
| ✎ | Edit project — rename it or change the description |
| ↓ | Download — opens the download wizard (format, sections, attachments) |
| ✕ | Delete project — removes the project and all its artifacts |
Click anywhere else on the card to open the project.
Creating a project
Click + New Project. The form offers a Project Type:
- Blank Project — start empty; enter a name and optional description.
- Templates — start from a template you previously saved with ⧉.
- Examples — start from a bundled example project (when the server ships any), useful for exploring the product with realistic data.
- 🎲 Random product (for testing) — start from a made-up product, when what you want is something to try OpenV on rather than your real work.
Choosing a template or example pre-fills the name and description; you can change both before creating.
Random products and the community pool
The random mode rolls a fake product — a name, a category, a one-line description, a vision and an audience — and pre-fills the form with it. Creating then drops you into the Guided Wizard with that framing already in place.
Three things feed the roll: the built-in concepts, the products your own connected agent invents (✨ Invent with agent, available while a runner is online), and the community pool — the fake products other OpenV users have shared. The pool is the one thing in OpenV every workspace reads and writes: anything published there is visible to everyone, so it is deliberately jokes and nothing else. What your agent invents joins it automatically, which is how it grows without anyone doing chores — so keep real people, customers and unreleased work out of the invention brief.
Above the card is a filter:
- 🎲 Random — reroll over the whole pool, which is the mode's original behaviour.
- Top 5 all time — the five most-voted products ever.
- Top 5 this week — the five most-voted products of the last seven days, a rolling window rather than a Monday-to-Sunday one.
Each entry in a Top 5 list shows its votes and a Use this button that puts it on the card and in the form.
▲ Vote on the card says "keep this one": one vote per account, pressed again to take it back, and the counts you see are everyone's. The hint beside it (· N this week) is that product's votes inside the weekly window. Only products that actually reached the shared pool can be voted for — a built-in concept, or an invention that stayed in this browser because the pool was full or the name was taken, has nothing for anyone else to vote on, and the arrow says so.
⚑ Report is the other side of the same coin: flag anything that does not belong, and three different people reporting it hides it from everyone's roll list pending review.
Downloading a project
There is one way out of a project, and it is the ↓ Download button — on the project card here, and in the Requirements toolbar inside the project. It opens a two-step wizard.
1. Format — what shape you need it in:
| Format | What it is |
|---|---|
| PDF specification | The document as a reader sees it: sections, artifacts, figures, traceability and each requirement's V&V status |
| Word document | The same specification as a .docx, for editing or review outside OpenV |
| JSON data | The complete project, which an OpenV import restores in full |
| CSV table | One row per artifact for a spreadsheet; links fold into a single column |
| Excel workbook (.xlsx) | A sheet per artifact type, a sheet of traceability links, and a cover naming the snapshot |
| ReqIF interchange | The OMG requirements interchange format, for other requirements tools; an OpenV import reads it back too |
2. Content — how much of it:
- Sections — tick the top-level sections to include. A section brings everything underneath it, however deep. Each shows how many artifacts it holds, so you can see what leaving one out costs.
- Artifact types — tick the types to include (requirements, test cases, and whatever else this project holds), and whether Headings come with them. Untick headings for a plain list of artifacts with no document structure around them.
- Attachments — tick the categories of file to bring along: figures,
unnumbered images, documents, data files. Only the categories this project
actually holds are offered. Ticking any makes the download a .zip: the
document plus an
attachments/folder, each file named by its figure reference where it has one.
The line at the foot of the wizard says what you are about to get — "1 of 3 sections, no headings, with figures" — and the button refuses to download a selection that would produce an empty file.
Whatever you pick applies to whichever format you chose: the filters are applied once, to the project snapshot, before the PDF or the CSV is built from it. A baseline selected in the Requirements toolbar is downloaded instead of the live project.
Import
- ↑ Import Project creates a new project from either of two files:
- a JSON file produced by the wizard's JSON data format, which restores the project in full (attachment files aside);
- a ReqIF file (
.reqifor.xml), from OpenV or from another requirements tool, which brings the hierarchy, links, statuses and attributes. Attachments and embedded objects are not carried, and a file from another tool is read on a best-effort basis, so check the new project against the source before relying on it.
- Download/import is a simple way to move a project between servers or keep an offline copy.
- CSV, Excel, PDF and Word are one-way: snapshots to read or to hand to another tool, not something OpenV reads back.
Inside a project
Opening a project shows the dark left sidebar with the project's modules:
| Entry | What it is |
|---|---|
| Overview | Product definition, metrics, personas, needs, interviews |
| Requirements | The artifact tree — create, edit, link, baseline |
| Guided Definition | Step-by-step wizard from framing to committed requirements |
| V&V | Coverage, gaps, test runs, PDF report |
| Matrix | Traceability matrix grid |
| Board | Kanban board with human and agent assignees |
| Crew | Crew builder — org chart of agents and people |
| Agents | Agent definitions and launcher |
| Automations | Scheduled and event-triggered agent runs |
| Runs | Agent run history and proposal review |
| Settings | Project access, repositories, agent auth, danger zone |
The project name under the workspace switcher takes you back to all projects. Your user block at the bottom of the sidebar opens Settings (personal runner and agent sign-ins) and Sign out.
Project access (members)
Project membership is managed in Settings → Access inside the project:
- Add a member by email. The person must already have an OpenV account — if no account exists for that email you'll see a message asking them to sign up first.
- Each member has a role — viewer, reviewer, editor, or owner (the add form defaults to editor; whoever creates a project becomes its owner) — you can change it from the members table, and members can be removed. A reviewer reads everything a viewer reads and adds notes, comments and mentions, but cannot change the text, the links, a status or a setting.
- Team access grants a whole workspace team access to the project at once, with a role per grant. Teams themselves are defined in Workspace settings — see Workspace settings & teams.
Share links
Under Settings → Access → Share links an owner mints links for people who are not members:
- A public link opens the live project read only, to anyone who holds it, with no account: the tree, every artifact, its attributes and traceability. Attachments and comments are not part of the shared view.
- A reviewer link asks the holder to sign in (or create an account) and then makes them a reviewer of the project. A member who already holds a stronger role keeps it.
Give each link a label saying who it is for and, if you like, an expiry. The link is shown once, when it is created — copy it then. Revoke a link and it stops opening anything for everyone who has it. Pasted into Slack, Discord, LinkedIn, Teams and the like, a link shows a preview card naming the project and its workspace.
Contributor (editor) access is never a link: grant it by name or team above.
Deleting a project
Use the ✕ on the project card, or Settings → Danger Zone inside the project. Deletion removes the project and all of its artifacts — download first if you might need it again.