Projects are the unit of isolation and collaboration in OpenShift. A project has one or more members, a quota on the resources that the project may consume, and the security controls on the resources in the project. Within a project, members may have different roles - project administrators can set membership, editors can create and manage the resources, and viewers can see but not access running containers. In a normal cluster project administrators are not able to alter their quotas - that is restricted to cluster administrators.
Listing or watching projects will return only projects the user has the reader role on.
An OpenShift project is an alternative representation of a Kubernetes namespace. Projects are exposed as editable to end users while namespaces are not. Direct creation of a project is typically restricted to administrators, while end users should use the requestproject resource.