= 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 consisting of Frank Warmerdam, Andrey Kiselev, Daniel Morissette and Howard Butler.  This project steering 
committee operates under the rules of [Rfc1Pmc 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 [RfcList list of past RFCs], and [PscMotions past motions] is available for review.