Welcome to the Sahana Policy and PMC WIKI. Here we document policies that have been formally approved by concensus or voting in the community or by the Project Mangement Committee. The Project Management Committee exists to ensure that the community is behaving and governing itself in a manner that is consistent with the objectives of making Sahana a successful free and open source disaster management project. This includes operational, legal and procedural oversight on Sahana releases. Getting into the PMC mainly requires that you contribute significantly to the project. Still most of our decisions will be a result of public input from the community and we strive to reach concense such that we can all move forward togeather.

Sahana Development Infrastructure 2009 (Infra09)

Significant Decisions Taken

October 2008

  • It was decided to not have part-committership access to the Sahana CVS and either full-commitership or not at all. - PMC Lazy Consensus Justification: We needed consistency on the access to CVS for all

September 2008

  • It was decided to change the policy of having all committers becoming PMC members and start using a more hierarchal structure of user→contributor→committer→PMC member - Community Lazy Concensus. Details of these level are specified in the new Sahana Meritocracy Policy. Justification: The requirement for PMC membership is stricter than for committership, however we wanted to recognize contributors at all levels, including non-technical ones
  • It was decided to outsource some of the administrative tasks on Sahana including sahana.lk DNS, data backup, sahana.lk email troubleshooting - Board Sponsorship. Justification: This will free the core developers to spend more time focusing on Sahana than standard admin tasks

July 2008

  • It was decided to setup a separate localization mailing group - PMC Lazy Consensus Justification: The people who work on translation are generally separate from users and developers and a separate group would help improve their productivity
  • It was decided to have more PMC members contribute to the main Sahana website with only a notification to the PMC when pages change - PMC Lazy Consensus Justification: We need to encourage more dynamic contribution, whilst ensuring the main website is representative of the Sahana project

June 2008

  • It was decided by the PMC to have an appointed release team with a release lead to ensure regular and frequent releases of the Sahana system. The current release team can be found here. Justification: To attack the problem of infrequent and unscheduled releases, clear ownership and drive needs to be placed by having such a dedicated team
  • It was decided by the PMC to have a pootle server on the sahana.lk server to promote better collaboration on the localization effort, especially during a crisis. Dominic and Prabath have been initially appointed to this role Justification: This would bring a tremendous amount of benefit in efficiency and maintenance of Sahana localizations

May 2008

  • It was decided that the support [at] sahana.lk be an alias for the sahana-user mailing list in source forge. Justification: Most of the questions sent to support were relevant for the context of the sahana-user mailing list. The guideline for the mailing lists can be found here - PMC decision by consensus
  • It was decided to maintain the privacy of the PMC mailing list as there are discussions sensitive in nature that should not be published to the wider community. However it was also decided that any decision by the PMC should be clearly documented and justified in the public PMC wiki (this page). Justification: A good example of a topic that need to be private is when new PMC members / committers are being nominated and discussed

Apr 2008

  • New administrators have been added to help out with the Sahana infrastructure. You can find them on the Sahana support page - PMC decision
  • Any changes to the sahana.lk website will have to be reviewed by the PMC - PMC decision. Justification: The sahana.lk site represents the “official word” on Sahana, thus it is important that any content on this site is approved by the PMC, which is the pinnacle group representing Sahana
  • We must do our best to remove redundant code from the code base. When we find them someone needs to post the redundant code and any dependencies on the list and wait for 3 days for any objections before deleting it from the CVS tree. - Community decision

Mar 2008

  • We will discontinue the usage of the Sahana forum - By PMC Concensus.
    • Justification: Utilization of the forum has been low and it has also proved to be hard to manage amidst the large number of spam that it keeps getting

Jan 2008

  • All committer / PMC additions will go through a process of review to ensure they have contributed significantly to the project. Checklist for Adding a New Member as a PMC member/committer - by PMC concensus
  • All committers and significant contributors will be invited to become PMC members - by PMC Concensus
    • Committers are given a invitation by default as they become committer.
    • Non code contributing members are nominated at the descrition of the PMC.
    • Justification: We would like to expand the community and thereby give more opportunity to those who are actively contributing to become members of the project management committee and contribute to the decision making process of governing the project.

Policy Process / Checklists

Governance

Work in Progress

Best Practices for Knowledge Transfer


Navigation
QR Code
QR Code policy:home (generated for current page)