1. Overview

The Community consists of all users of the EasySDI solution. Users are independant and their participation in the project is voluntary based. Each user is free to use EasySDI code in respect to its GPL V3.0 licence.

Within the EasySDI project the following kinds of roles are recognized:

Users download, install and use EasySDI components where Users typically contribute to documentation or configuration
Developers are people able to apply changes to the EasySDI source code
Committers are allowed to commit artefacts to the EasySDI code repository
The Project Steering Committee is a small group of individuals who are responsible for all organisational and strategic aspects of project management

The remainder of this document contains more detailed information about these groups or structural entities.

2. Community detailed description

Users

Users are individuals or institutions who download, install and use EasySDI components. They can contribute to the Community with forums posts, tutorials and documentation writing, funding work, etc.

Developpers

Developpers are individuals or institutions who are able to apply changes to the EasySDI source code and submit patches .

Committers

Committers are individuals from the Developers groups who are allowed to commit artefacts to the EasySDI code repository.

Commit rights are granted upon request by the PSC. Individuals who already have contributed significant resources to the project may apply for commit rights. The prior commitment is usually shown by regularly submitting code that conforms to the current é EasySDI development best practices é and by involvement into the discussions at the developer and user list.

Project Steering Committee (PSC)

The Project Steering Committee is a small group of individuals who are responsible for all organisational and strategic aspects of project management.

PSC consists of individuals recognized for their competences or dynamism within the Community. The PSC decides about the major directions of the EasySDI project, the roadmap and the Committers. All decisions made by the PSC are either made in consensus or based on a single majority. The PSC usually meets online once a month and physically once a year in person.

Responsibilities of the PSC include:

setting the overall development road map
ensuring regular releases (major and maintenance) of EasySDI solution
overall technical aspects and strategic choices of EasySDI solution
project infrastructure (e.g. SVN, Mailing Lists, Wiki, Tracker, hosting options, etc...)
formalization of affiliation with external entities
setting project priorities, especially with respect to project sponsorship
creation and oversight of specialized sub-committees (e.g. project infrastructure, training)
vote on PSC membership

schema_community_easysdi

a. PSC specific tasks

Specific tasks should be supported by PSC members to assure things moving forward. Tasks should be supported naturally by volunteers PSC members and is subject to vote. Tasks are defined as follow :

- Communication management - ensure communication to be done (news, tweet,etc...) regularly and in a coherent way
- Technical architect - ensure technical coherence and integrity of the project code
- Documentation management - ensure documentation progress and quality, bring new contributors to it.
- Translation Management - ensure translation and quality of EasySDI langages files, bring new contributors to it.

Others tasks might be added here in the future.

b. Membership

The PSC is made up of individuals consisting of Committers and prominent members of the EasySDI user community. There is no set number of members for the PSC although the initial desire is to set the membership at a maximum of 10.

c. Adding Members

Any member of the Community may nominate someone for committee membership at any time. Only existing PSC committee members may vote on new members. Nominees must receive a majority vote from existing members to be added to the PSC.

d. Stepping Down

If for any reason a PSC member is not able to fully participate then they certainly are free to step down. If a member is not active (e.g. no voting, no email participation) for a period of 6 months then the committee reserves the right to seek nominations to fill that position. Should that person become active again then they would certainly be welcome, but would require a nomination.

e. Meetings

Meeting minutes may be found on the forge PSC Meeting page

f. Members of the PSC

Founding members are

- Bruno Magoni
- Xavier Mérour
- Thomas Portier

Current members of the PSC are :

- Bruno Magoni (2009), technical architect
- Xavier Mérour (2009)
- Thomas Portier (2009)

3. Decision process - Request for Comments

It concerns any kind of decision : technical, strategic, commit rights or PSC membership.

Proposals are named "Request for Comment" (RFC) and are written up and submitted on forge.easysdi.org by creating a "new issue" under the concerned sub-project with Tracker set to "Request for Comments". Proposals are then available for discussion by any interested party, not just committee members.

Proposals need to be available for review before a final decision can be made.
Respondents may vote "+1" to indicate support for the proposal and a willingness to support implementation.
Respondents may vote "-1" to indicate disagreement with the proposal, but must provide clear reasoning and alternate approaches to resolving the problem within the two days.
A "0" indicates no opinion.

Anyone may comment on proposals on the list, but only members of Steering Committe votes will be counted.

A proposal will be accepted if it receives a single majority (including the proposer) of "+1".

Upon completion of discussion and voting, the PSC should announce whether they are proceeding (proposal accepted) or are withdrawing their proposal (proposal rejected).

4. Call for Sponsors

For any consequent work to be done on EasySDI project (coding, hosting, communication,...), PSC may make a "Call for Sponsors" by writting up the needs and submitting it on forge.easysdi.org by creating a "new issue" under the concerned sub-project with Tracker set to "Call for Sponsors".

Interested community members should show interest by answering to Call for Sponsors.
Call for Sponsors is normally driven by a PSC member but could also be driven by any Community member willing to support this task.

5. Community Websites

Community websites (www.easysdi.org and forge.easysdi.org) are tools for the sake of the community in order to offer maximum visibility and transparency of the project. They gather in the most coherent way informations about the EasySDI project, like :

- general description of the project (modules, architecture, depedencies,...)
- contacts and description of the PSC
- forums and lists
- tickets management(bug, evolution)
- wikis
- documentation
- roadmap
- sources (of course!)
- tutorials
- demo website
- etc.

To benefit from all ressources (for example, submit a new ticket), one may need to register under forge.easysdi.org

Community websites are strictly non-commercial.

6. Credits

The "Structures and Procedures of the deegree project" and "Mapserver Technical Steering Committee Guidelines" were used as a blueprint for this page. Thanks to both Communities for this very valuable input!