= Governance and Community Participation =

== OSGeo Project Membership ==

Traditionally GDAL has been lead by Frank Warmerdam, the original author of
much of GDAL/OGR, though with contributions and input from a variety of people. 
As of February 2006 GDAL/OGR became a founding project of the 
[http://www.osgeo.org/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo)]
and began a transition to a more community oriented governance model - in keeping
with OSGeo expectations. 

Membership as an OSGeo project provides assurances that a variety of best practices
are being employed by the GDAL/OGR project, and that users and contributors can
be assured of responsible project operation and continuity of the project.   In
particular:

 * A consensus oriented Project Management Committee will be in charge of the project.
 * Project source code and contributions will be vetted to ensure code is properly made available, protecting contributors and users of GDAL/OGR. 
 * Systems infrastructure is provided by the foundation, with responsible backup and redundancy to minimize disruptions. 


== Project Management Committee ==

As of April 2006 (following the GDAL/OGR 1.3.2 release) the project has been placed in the hands of a Project Steering Committee.  This project steering committee operates under the rules of [wiki:rfc1_pmc GDAL/OGR RFC 1], and is overall responsible for decisions related to the GDAL/OGR project.  The current members are:

 * Frank Warmerdam
 * Andrey Kiselev
 * Daniel Morissette
 * Howard Butler
 * Tamas Szekeres
 * Even Rouault (chair)
 * Jukka Rahkonen

Note that discussion of proposals to the PMC take place on gdal-dev, and input from all subscribers is welcome.  A [RfcList list of past RFCs], and [PscMotions past motions] is available for review. 

=== Meetings ===

Occational (usually release focused) meetings are held in the #gdal IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.  All interested parties are welcome.

 * FirstMeeting
 * SecondMeeting
 * ThirdMeeting (Oct 24, 2008)