John,

At Stanford, this is governed by the Research Policy Handbook; there is some tech transfer and copyright detail, but essentially it says staff may release University-funded code with with an open source license with officer (Dean-level) approval. 

At Stanford, we have put this into place with blanket approval for releasing any code we deem shareable under a license (Apache 2 being default, but not required). We have similar approval under the same terms to release non-code artifacts under a CC license. 

Based on this, we have templates for inserting license files into repos on Github, and default text to use for copyright statements. 

I can dig up source docs if that's useful.

- Tom




On Jan 8, 2015, at 4:22 PM, John A. Kunze wrote:

> Does anyone have existing institutional policy guidelines for staff who
> contribute to open source software projects?
> 
> A group at the California Digital Library is looking to learn from prior
> art in dealing appropriately with non-technical things like licensing,
> intellectual property, legal policy, cost/benefit issues, etc.
> 
> It would be great if any of you have something like that to share.
> 
> -John