The current state of Steering Committee is as follows. We have 4 members from 3 organizations:
Julien Michel (me) from CNES
Victor Poughon from CNES
Guillaume Pasero from CS
Remi Cresson from IRSTEA
It is important that the PSC exists and represents the users and contributors community. Compared to the size of this community, Our PSC is very small (and not very representative).
In the early days, work of the PSC was mostly about setting up the rules and also voting changes made to the codebase. Now that rules are well established, and voting have been relaxed and made way easier by the use of gitlab and CI, there is not much work to do for PSC on this side anymore.
Yet there are still many topics for which PSC is important:
Relationship with OSGeo,
Relationships with Qgis and other software in OTB ecosystem,
Organizing users days,
Organizing and teaching training courses,
Help with big decisions beyond the daily merge requests business,
Historical knowledge of the code …
For instance, we are still working actively on OTB 7.0. A wider PSC may help to chose between further refactoring delaying 7.0 or releasing earlier with less changes.
The take home message:
PSC is still important even with everything on track for the daily management of software,
Workload for PSC members is low (maybe participate to a few threads with votes on the forum per year)
The current PSC is too small and does not represent users and contributors correctly,
I would be happy to join as a user representative, but despite the fact that I use OTB since its beginning, my developer skills are limited. Also, I must warn that I am avoiding to travel as much as I can, so discussions on the forum are OK but I would not “physically” participate to all meetings.
Thanks a lot for your proposal. There should be little or no travel required to participate, and developers skills are also not required. In fact, the current PSC is mainly composed of developers, so we could use a fresh user-centric eye!
Once you are officialy elected, your role consist in:
Reading Merge Requests ( https://gitlab.orfeo-toolbox.org/orfeotoolbox/otb/merge_requests ) and provide feedback if you can. You do not have to read all of them and you can focus on the user experience side (parameters name, default behavior and all the rest). You could already do that, but the big difference is that as a PSC member you can veto a proposition by voting -1. Use this power wisely!
Participate in any discussion that comes up in the Community & Steering Committee section on this forum, and vote decisions
Occasionaly give a presentation, training or advocate for OTB in conferences or workshops you attend to.
Of course you can also initiate any discussion or feature request you want.
I will start another thread for the election process.
Dear all,
I’d like to apply to the PSC.
I think there are many discussions that we need to have on how OTB will evolve in the next years (simplify build/deployment, improve python interfaces, etc.).
Besides, OSGeo regularly need to contact a referent to update project status, and my colleague have resigned from the project since a few years.
Best regards,
Yannick