[GRASS5] Project Steering Committee voting

[Brad Douglas]

On Wed, 2006-04-26 at 18:39 +0200, Markus Neteler wrote:
> Helena,
> 
> I thought that I had explained a few times the need of having
> a steering committee. I agree on not adding much overhead.
> 
> But so far I got only negative responses on this while the
> issue that one reverts the changes of others isn't really
> solved.

Sorry for the late reply, but I'm just starting to get caught up with
reading the PSC documents and emails.

I've also noticed a lack of support for Markus' proposal.  I completely
understand that this is a very "dry" topic, but it merits discussion.  I
believe a loose PSC is inevitable and the foundation is mandatory, if
for no other reason than to protect against legal liability.

> In fact we have nominations for the PSC but nobody said what
> is next step. The first step is that people agree on *having*
> such structure. Only then we can render the nominations into
> something else.

+1

> As far as I remember only Michael and Glynn answered, both
> pointing out that a PSC is not desired.

I believe a PSC is advantageous and necessary.  We have to have some
organization that can be put on paper to satisfy the foundation
requirements.  How it is implemented is completely up for debate (and is
probably somewhat fleshed out in emails I haven't read yet).

> The big question is maybe if people are interested to join
> the OSGeo efforts or not. If not, it should also be discussed
> how to maintain this project in future. So far we have sponsorship
> from ITC-irst (web site structure, partial funding of developers
> working at ITC-irst) and Intevation (CVS, RT). But this isn't
> granted forever. I see OSGeo as an opportunity to give GRASS
> a stable (secondary) home.

We need legal protection.  It may be unlikely that contributors to GRASS
be on the receiving end of a law suit, but we should cover all of our
bases.  We *need* some entity, whatever that may be.  I think this
aspect has been undersold.

> As Frank pointed out: the comments here on the "contributors agreement"
> already had major impact. So it is not true that OSGeo would take
> the software and do something else with it (this even doesn't
> make sense).
> 
> Here the steps as I see them currently:
> 
> step 1: do we want to join the OSGeo foundation, at least make GRASS
>         a foundation project?

+1

> if yes/no to 1:
>   step 2: do we want to establish a project steering committee for
>           general decisions

+1

> if yes to 1 and 2:
>   step 3: how do we render the nominations into members (sort of 
>           bootstrapping democracy)

I have no idea.  Top code contributors for a given project area who have
not declined nomination?

> The code provenance review we partially did for the change to GPL in 1999,
> but tons of copyright statements are missing. I have received a nice perl
> script to semi-automatize this from Schuyler Erle which I am happy to
> add to the tools/ directory. Obviously I cannot review a few thousand
> files myself... but a code review is needed from time to time.

I saw the script committed today.  =)


-- 
Brad Douglas <rez at touchofmadness.com>                      KB8UYR
Address: 37.493,-121.924 / WGS84    National Map Corps #TNMC-3785