Governance

Purpose

The CDAT Review Board (URB) is a group of individuals whose goal is to advance the technology in CDAT by providing direction and oversight to its development. While the open-source nature of CDAT allows natural progression via its many developers, the board seeks to balance the intentions of each small group of developers, ensuring that changes will benefit the community as a whole. The URB serves the following functions:

Any changes in direction that deviate significantly from the CDAT proposal must be cleared with the Department of Energy (DOE) Biological and Environmental Research (BER) office, the primary sponsor of this activity.

Scope of URB Intervention

Code changes with a high impact on developers and/or users should be reviewed by the URB. The following are some guiding principles for deciding whether changes require URB involvement:

Bug fixes will not in general require URB approval. Small feature additions will not require approval provided they are part of an associated development plan (see the Managing the Development Process document). In both cases, changes must be formally documented and published to the mailing list for comment before implementation.

Roles

The Chair organizes the meeting agenda and maintains the roadmap and the list of outstanding proposals requiring URB intervention. He or she is also responsible for setting up URB meeting times/places and ensuring that the goals of the meeting are accomplished. The Chair may invite individuals or groups who have submitted proposals to present their plans at URB meetings.

The Secretary keeps records of each meeting, assists in the setup of the meeting location and technology (e.g. projectors, video conferencing, etc.) required, and facilitates communication of proposals to the URB, as well as decisions from the URB back to the community.

Meetings

The URB will meet on a schedule of their choosing and convenience, but at least twice a year. The URB may meet informally at any time as the need arises to evaluate proposals. (Meeting notes and scheduled meetings will be posted on the CDAT website.)

Conflict Resolution

Conflicts will be resolved by discussion and consensus where at all possible. When such an agreement is impossible, the members of the URB will vote on the issue, with the Chair breaking any tie vote.

Membership

Initial membership was determined by the CDAT Project Leader at LLNL and consists of the following individuals:

Future URB membership will develop organically from the URB itself. URB members are responsible for nominating new members, who are elected by consensus or majority vote (with the Chair breaking any tie). Existing members may step down from the URB at any point. Members who are unable to attend meetings after reasonable effort to contact them, or are found to be exceedingly counterproductive to the purposes of the URB, may be dropped from the URB by consensus or vote.

Mailing List

The URB member mailing list:

Contributor License Agreements (“Agreement”)