Structures and Procedures of the deegree project
This wiki page describes organisational structures and procedures of deegree.
Contents
1. Overview
Within the deegree project the following kinds of contribution are recognized:
- Users are individuals or institutions who download, install and use deegree components.
- Developers are individuals or institutions who are able to apply changes to the deegree source code.
- Committers are individuals from the Users or Developers groups who are allowed to commit artefacts to the deegree code repository, where Users typically contribute to documentation or configuration and Developers commit source code.
- The Technical Management Committee is a small group of individuals who are responsible for all technical aspects of project management.
- 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. Users
Users are individuals or institutions who download, install and use deegree components.
[TBD: Describe interest, roles and responsibilities of User group]
3. Developers
Developers are individuals or institutions who are able to apply changes to the deegree source code.
[TBD: Describe interest, roles and responsibilities of Developer group]
Meetings: Meeting minutes may be found on the deegree3/DeveloperMeeting page.
4. Committers
Committers are individuals from the Users or Developers groups who are allowed to commit artefacts to the deegree code repository, where Users typically contribute to documentation or configuration and Developers commit source code.
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 deegree developer guide and by involvement into the discussions at the developer and user list.
More information can be found in the deegree committer guidelines. [JF: To be aligned with this document! Review needed!]
Any individual that has been approved by the PSC with commit rights to the deegree SVN should have a look at detailed technical description of how to get commit access to SVN. This page describes how to set up a committer account and gives hints on further steps.
5. Technical Management Committee
The Technical Management Committee is a small group of individuals who are responsible for all technical aspects of project management.
Responsibilities of the TMC include:
- making proposals for the overall development road map to the PSC
- developing technical standards and policies (e.g. coding standards, file naming conventions, etc...)
reviewing feature requests for technical enhancements to the software [JF: the mapserver guidelines had "RFC" instead of "feature requests", but I found the latter more straight forward, as we do not have to establish an RFC process. We simply use the Feature Request Tracker]
Membership: TMC members are nominated by the PSC. TMC members are:
Reijer Copier (IDgis)
Torsten Friebe (lat/lon)
Andreas Schmitz (Occam Labs)
Markus Schneider (Occam Labs)
Johannes Wilden (lat/lon)
Contact: You may contact the TMC via email: <tmc AT SPAMFREE deegree DOT org>. There is also an issue tracker for the TMC, for the technical side of deegree.
6. Project Steering Committee
The Project Steering Committee is a small group of individuals who are responsible for all organisational and strategic aspects of project management. The PSC decides about the major directions of the deegree project, the dates and content of major releases and who the project developers are. All decisions made by the PSC are either made in consensus or based on a single majority. The PSC communicates via E-Mail, IRC (#deegree) and usually meets once a year in person.
Current PSC Members are:
Herman Assink (IDgis)
Jens Fitzke (lat/lon), Chair
Prof. Dr. Klaus Greve (Bonn University)
Contact: You may contact the PSC via email: <psc AT SPAMFREE deegree DOT org>. There is also an issue tracker for the PSC, for the organisational side of the deegree project.
Responsibilities of the PSC include:
- setting the overall development road map
- ensuring regular releases (major and maintenance) of deegree software
- project infrastructure (e.g. SVN, Mailing Lists, Wiki, Tracker, hosting options, etc...)
- formalization of affiliation with external entities such as OSGeo
- setting project priorities, especially with respect to project sponsorship
- creation and oversight of specialized sub-committees (e.g. project infrastructure, training)
- nomintation of TSC members
Membership: The PSC is made up of individuals consisting of Committers and prominent members of the deegree 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.
Adding Members: Any member of the deegree-devel mailing list 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.
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 two months then the committee reserves the right to seek nominations to fill that position. Should that person become active again (hey, it happens) then they would certainly be welcome, but would require a nomination.
Meetings: Meeting minutes may be found on the PscMeeting page.
7. Credits
The Mapserver Technical Steering Committee Guidelines were used as a blueprint for this page. Thanks to Frank and Steve for this very valuable input!