Discovery Governance

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Premise

• Multiple data centers now involved in the various Discovery services.
• Issues related with interoperability, distributed centers, different standards.

Goals

• Want open and interoperable Discovery standard
• We should agree on a process. Then follow it.

Process

We have adopted a governance process similar to the Open Provenance Model governance.

The governance process encompasses the following:

• Submission of new proposals
• Forum to review proposals
• Author revision based on feedback
• Voting on change proposals
• Ratification or rejection by editors

Notes:

• Changes to existing standards are done as change proposals.
• All steps are posted to the mailing list and wiki.

See the Discovery Governance Process Steps for more info.

Discovery Change Proposal (DCP)

All changes to the Discovery specifications must go through the governance process starting with a Discovery Change Proposal (DCP). Each DCP must include the following context for reference:

• A unique identifier. An incrementing number is commonly used in these types of community-based processes.
• Timestamp of when proposal was submitted.
• Proposal review period (implies a deadline)
• Current governance step (submitted, proposal review, revision, vote, final review, ratified, rejected)
• Background
• Problem addressed
• Proposed solution
• Rationale for the solution
• Validation for specification (where appropriate. e.g. XML Schema validator)

See the Discovery Change Proposals list.

Editors

Editors on the governance board coordinate the governance process. The responsibilities may include:

• Working with the community on accepting input for change proposals
• Drafting the proposals
  • Writing up proposed specifications
• Coordinating the discussions
• Coordinating the voting process
• Ratifying the proposal
• Implementing some of the changes

See the current Discovery Editors.

Documentation

All governance processes shall be transparent. All discussions will be available on the Discovery mailing list and Discovery Cluster wiki.