Formal MapServer Technical Committee Proposal

[Sean Gillies]

On Jul 12, 2005, at 1:17 PM, Frank Warmerdam wrote:

> Folks,
>
> Well, it look me several extra weeks to get back and revise the
> Technical Steering Committee proposal, but it is now updated and
> available at:
>
>   http://ms.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-1/view
>
> For those (ie. in the user community) who haven't heard of this
> effort before, it is an attempt to add some formality and process
> to how the developers decide technical issues.   I don't think the
> technical folks have had many arguments so far, but I have felt
> it is hard for us to actually make decisions on some things.  I hope
> this will improve that.=20
>
> I think this takes into account most of the advise received.   A few
> notes:
>
>  o For the time being I have explicitly removed the web site and
>     documentation from the purview of the Technical Steering Committee
>     to keep things minimalist.=20
>
>  o I have removed discussion of how we will manage proposal documents
>    other than that they should initially be announced and voted on
>    mapserver-dev.   I think we will use some mixture of bugzilla and=20
>    the web site for this, but I am leaving it for the committee to 
> define
>    how that will work.=20
>

Frank,

I apologize for being late in responding. I'm looking for minor changes 
or clarifications on three things.

Is 2 days too short? We could practically extend this if people agreed 
to give the committee a heads up as soon as they started to scope out a 
new feature and begin a proposal. I'm against having too many gates in 
the development process, but travel and vacations can take people away 
from committee duties for more than 2 days.

Is this committee one of individuals, like the ASF, or are we 
representing different agencies and companies? I think we could be 
explicit about this in the guidelines.

It is written that a proposal must be made in the case of "substantial" 
new code. We don't have any measure of what substantial means. Could we 
change it to say that new features and enhancements require a proposal?

Thanks again for taking the lead on this,
Sean

--
Sean Gillies
sgillies at frii dot com
http://zcologia.com