Governance and affiliation

[alimanfoo]

Following on from #291, I'm raising this issue as a focus for discussing a governance process and model, and associated issues like affiliation and legal protection.

Given that Zarr is closely aligned with the PyData ecosystem, the default approach is probably to follow the examples of other prominent projects within the ecosystem, e.g., NumPy, Jupyter, or pandas.

A key commonality for all of the above projects is that they are formally affiliated with NumFOCUS, which "serves as its fiscal sponsor, may hold project trademarks and other intellectual property, helps manage project donations and acts as a parent legal entity".

For comparison, there are other options for governance and affiliation of open source projects, such as the Apache Software Foundation, which runs the Apache Incubator as the entry path for new projects.

One possible difference with the above projects is that the Zarr project includes development of both specifications and implementations of those specifications. A point for consideration is whether the same process can apply to both specs and code, or whether specs need a different process.

There are various organisations involved in standardisation of technical specifications, which have processes and structures that we might draw on.

[jakirkham]

Are we ok to create an empty governance repo to start?

cc @zarr-developers/core-devs

[jakirkham]

Have created the governance repo. Am not attached to the name if we need to rename it to zarr-governance for instance. ( zarr-developers/governance#1 )

Should we close this and start adding issues over there?

[alimanfoo]

SGTM, thanks John.

…

On Thu, 14 Feb 2019 at 20:44, jakirkham ***@***.***> wrote: Have created the governance repo <https://github.com/zarr-developers/governance>. Am not attached to the name if we need to rename it to zarr-governance for instance. Should we close this and start adding issues over there? — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#400 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAq8QpieukslA2ZZ6_jI5TamQif5m6viks5vNcqygaJpZM4awIj9> .

-- Alistair Miles Head of Epidemiological Informatics Centre for Genomics and Global Health Big Data Institute Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery University of Oxford Old Road Campus Headington Oxford OX3 7LF United Kingdom Phone: +44 (0)1865 743596 or +44 (0)7866 541624 Email: alimanfoo@googlemail.com Web: http://a <http://purl.org/net/aliman>limanfoo.github.io/ Twitter: @alimanfoo <https://twitter.com/alimanfoo> Please feel free to resend your email and/or contact me by other means if you need an urgent reply.