GRASS Project Steering Commitee
This page discusses the need for a GRASS Project Steering Commitee (PSC), preferably at a low level of complication.
1st Letter to GRASS mailing lists
02/10/2006 06:15 PM
Dear GRASS community,
in the Chicago meeting the GRASS project was suggested to
as one of the initial OSGeo foundation projects.
So far I only received positive feedback on the idea of
moving GRASS more formally to the foundation (while the
individual authors are keeping their copyright which is
a major difference to the Apache Foundation.)
A couple of things will have to be sorted out in the
coming months to make GRASS's membership possible (below
list is inspired by Frank's mail to the GRASS project):
o We will need to form a "GRASS Project Steering Committee"
(PSC). Foundation projects need a formalized management
which may be desired in any case. I would be glad to
receive suggestions of names for this committee. For
inspiration, please look at the MapServer Technical
Steering Committee as described here:
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-1
o One benefit of the foundation is some degree of legal
support and protection for the project. The flip side of that
is that the foundation needs to ensure some degree of
rigor and process in how code comes into the project. One
part of that is getting committers to sign a legal agreement
indicating that they agree that changes they commit will
be under the license of GRASS (GPL) and that they have
the right to submit the code (they wrote it, it is not
patented, have permission from their employer, etc).
o We will have to review the existing code base (which is
huge - more than 500000 lines of source code in GRASS 6).
Luckily a major code review was already done for GRASS 5.
Also the "Debianization" process was performed for GRASS
5 and GRASS 6.
o It is suggested to move the support infrastructure for GRASS
to new foundation systems. Stuff like CVS (maybe SVN then),
and bugtracker and mailing lists. The web site will also
likely appear under a foundation subdomain (ie. grass.osgeo.org)
with hopefully the known mirror site structure as before
with grass.itc.it, grass.ibiblio.org etc as principal mirror
sites. If so, the web site will be migrated into a contents
management system (CMS) in a harmonized "foundation style".
A CMS will hopefully solve the problem to get more people
involved in the Web site contents management.
o We hope to establish options to enable sponorship for the
foundation - be as direct funding or for selected foundation
projects. Details have to be worked out. My suggestion is to
create national tax-exempt organizations (such as the
German GRASS Anwender-Vereinigung e.V. which already exists)
which may offer to receive donations.
o For now we should think about nominating people with
recognized contribution to the GRASS project, to
free data, to whatever deems significant. A small paragraph
describing why the candidate is proposed as member to
the foundation is needed as well. This will be announced
more formally soon. Please see ongoing discussions here:
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
(Nearly) nothing is set in stone yet.
More details will follow, a couple of official documents
are being currently prepared
Your feedback is welcome.
Markus
______
2nd Letter to GRASS mailing lists
02/11/2006 12:16 AM
Dear all,
while I already received two suggestions for a GRASS
Project Steering Committee (PSC), I suggest to post the
nominations in public, if there are no objections.
I would like to have that transparent to everyone.
Nominations should contain the name and a short paragraph
why it is a good candidate. We also have to decide,
how many members the PSC should have.
It is worth reading
- http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html
(they are very successful, and the document applies much
to the GRASS project culture)
- http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-1/
(MS RFC 1: Technical Steering Committee Guidelines)
apparently 7 members there.
- http://lists.maptools.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2006-February/thread.html#7881
(GDAL PSC to be formed)
- http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-10/
(MS RFC 10: Joining the Open Source Geospatial Foundation)
Related:
- https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=9682788&forum_id=475
(Community MapBuilder PMC membership nomination)
- https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=9673493&forum_id=475
(MapBuilder & Mapbender and the OSGeo Foundation)
In fact, there is lot of material to digest in these days..
Markus
3rd Letter to GRASS Dev mailing list
Markus Neteler neteler at itc.it Sun, 23 Apr 2006 18:10:25 +0200 On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 01:00:01PM +0100, Glynn Clements wrote: ... > Alpha support in the current display architecture isn't going to > happen (I reverted the last attempt to add it, and will do likewise in > future). ... this is why I really suggest to get interested in a project steering committee [1], [2]. Instead of recursively reverted changes of other developers, we should come up with a design discussion and then *vote* on it. At least for such crucidal pieces of the code I would like to see less anarchy and a more formal approach. This will render development more transparent to everybody. The scope cannot be to have two display management systems in parallel, one without and one with alpha support. Existing steering committees, to get inspired from: Mapserver: http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-1 GDAL: http://www.gdal.org/rfc1_pmc.html Mapbender: http://www.mapbender.org/index.php/Mapbender_PSC ... Please think about it! Thanks Markus [1] http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass5/2006-February/021178.html [2] http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass5/2006-April/022185.html
Answers:
Nominations
The comments were copied from the related emails.
- Brad Douglas (nominated by 1): for clone removal and code refactoring
- Cedric Shock (nominated by 1): various code contributions
- Dylan Beaudette (nominated by 1): deep commitment to community, publishes useful tips
- Glynn Clements (nominated by 1): for his vast knowledge of standards, practices and compatibility
- Hamish Bowman (nominated by 1): for documentation, integration, and various modules
- Helena Mitasova (nominated by 1): for the obvious
- Maciej Sieczka
- Markus Neteler (nominated by 2): for the obvious. :-)
- Michael Barton (nominated by 1): very responsive to comments and questions; various code contributions
- Paolo Zatelli (nominated by 1 ): no reason given
- Paul Kelly (nominated by 1): for PROJ and platform support
- Radim Blazek (nominated by 1): for his extensive GRASS work including vector and DBMS support
- Roger Bivand (nominated by 1): no reason given
- Venkatesh Raghavan (nominated by 1):
Declined (please reconsider =])
- Radim Blazek (nominated by 1): for his extensive GRASS work including vector and DBMS support
Status September 2006
The GRASS Project Steering Committee (PSC)
- Michael Barton (michael barton * asu edu)
- Dylan Baudette (debeaudette * ucdavis edu)
- Hamish Bowman (hamish_nospam * yahoo com)
- Massimiliano Cannata (massimiliano cannata * supsi ch)
- Brad Douglas (rez * touchofmadness com)
- Paul Kelly (paul-grass stjohnspoint co uk)
- Helena Mitasova (hmitaso * unity ncsu edu)
- Scott Mitchell (smitch * mac com)
- Markus Neteler (neteler * itc it)
- Maciej Sieczka (tutey * o2 pl)
(see also GRASS team page)
Next step: Revise RFC1 (Request for comment; click on HEAD there) for the GRASS community to consider