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 ​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 consisting of Frank Warmerdam, Andrey Kiselev, Daniel Morissette, Howard Butler and Tamas Szekeres. This project steering committee operates under the rules of GDAL/OGR RFC 1.

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