Governance

[e-lo]

We have some big outstanding decisions on the table (#37 ) that have come up again more recently, which makes me think we need to evolve our governance to more rigorously support both the evolution of the serialization format as well as the continued improvement of SDKs/plugins (what are we calling them?)

Why Governance?

• Make sure everyone who will be impacted by a decision about the format and the APIs has their needs understood and considered
• Make it clear how/when decisions are made in order to promote collaborative and friendly additions to the data format and the APIs that can support modern software engineering and packaging.

The way it is...

• Original serialized format and features are described in a wiki page with verbose but not particularly declarative language https://github.com/osPlanning/omx/wiki/Data-Structure-0.2
• The requirements for the project but not the format and required features itself (???) are described here: https://github.com/osPlanning/omx/wiki/Open-matrix-requirements
• The following people have admin access to this repo, meaning they can change other people's permissions: Ben Stabler, Billy Charlton, Elizabeth Sall
• The following people have write access to this repo in addition to the admins: @toliwaga @mmilkovits @Ennazus @bricegnichols @stefancoe @gregorbj
• There is no defined process for making decisions about the serialization format and/or the plug-ins. This leads to a de facto policy of "whatever people with write access decide to do unilaterally ". Note: there hasn't been a problem with anyone going rogue!

Possible Outcomes

Not all of these are mutually exclusive

1. Do nothing: the benevolent dictators have been fine, and people don't care about if/how decisions are made.
2. Formalize existing situation: Ben/Billy/Elizabeth could continue being BDFLs, but we write it down and define all roles and corresponding levels of github access and a CLA. Question: What if they disagree?
3. Separate the governance for the Software vs Data Format Software would be expected to evolve more quickly. Data format should evolve slowly and deliberately.
4. Adopt a more inclusive change-making process Here is one I developed for TIDES which we could simplify for OMX. There are also other examples.

Who decides if/when/how to change our governance?

Ultimately @bstabler is really the BDFL right now even though @billyc and @e-lo gave themselves admin access :-) so @bstabler ... what do you say? And how do you want to incorporate others' comments/feelings in order to prevent a hard fork :-)

[pedrocamargo]

@e-lo, I believe it would be important to have software providers at the table, as buy-in is essential. On that note, we currently maintain AequilibraE and POLARIS, and would like to be able to provide some input to any change proposed, as we currenly use (heavily) both the Python and the C++ APIs.

[billyc]

Waking up to all these OMX messages feels like Xmas came early! 🎅

I'm looking forward to @bstabler chiming in on this.

@pedrocamargo in the previous round we designed the standard in the open, collaboratively, followed by inviting the commercial providers to comment and ultimately implement. Their participation was crucial back then and is again very important for acceptance/adoption! But I am not sure it is necessary (although welcome) at the design stage.

And @pedrocamargo given your group's intimate familiarity with the code recently, I fully support your team leading these updates: the practical know-how you've gained is so valuable. ❤️

[billyc]

It would be great to harness this new enthusiasm for updating OMX.

Resolving the project governance will help get everyone on board with any upcoming changes; thanks @e-lo for writing it all down. Once we have an agreement on governance, the current topics fit (IMHO) in a neat, logical order of growing complexity:

• the h5py update first, affects Python only
• followed by sparse matrix support in the existing HDF5 container, which would require updates to each language implementation
• followed by a longer-term examination of the container itself.
• surely more topics will come up as these tasks are tackled

Maybe we need a constitutional convention soon to push this conversation forward! ✍️

[Ennazus]

You can remove my write access.

It also feels like Christmas to me to hear Elizabeth and Billy talk about omx.

Omx has been a resounding success I'd say!