BOINC transitioning to a Community Based Governance

[UBT - Timbo]

Hi all,

I wonder what everyone thinks of this:

BOINC transitioning to a Community Based Governance...

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=10370

David Anderson wrote:

BOINC's funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation has ended, at least for the time being.

This funding supported me, Rom Walton, and Charlie Fenton.

We're now working on other things, although we'll stay involved in BOINC at some level.

The BOINC project will continue, and will be run according to a community-based model rather than centrally.

In essence, the people who contribute to BOINC now make the decisions about it.

This model is summarized here: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/ProjectGovernance

and described in detail here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C6p ... 8YpvsnR-gg


There will probably be little visible change.

The BOINC software will continue to work.

The translation system, Alpha testing project, BOINC web site,message boards, and email lists will continue to operate.

However, any new development and major bug fixes to BOINC will need to be done by volunteer programmers.

I'm confident that the BOINC community will meet the challenge.

I welcome your feedback.

Please post it to boinc_admin@googlegroups.com, a new email list for discussions about the BOINC project as a whole.

-- David

Personally, I think putting BOINC development into the community to allow it to be improved is a very good thing...however, the issue is going to be whether it causes "splits" within the community, where one group wants one function and another group doesn't....At least under David A, there was a strong leadership which moved things along, even if you didn't agree with it.

One assumes that there will be some people who will step forward who want to be involved and who will help to maintain and evolve BOINC.

Let's hope it all doesn't implode on itself.

And I guess a vote of thanks should be tabled for the work that David A, Rom and many others have put into this over the last 11 years.

regards
Tim

[Woodles]

I suppose it all depends on whether people are interested in modifying and taking it forward and their motives for doing so.

Linux is community based and seems to be doing alright, various 'flavours' have spun off but they seem to keep a relatively constant set of core features.

However, I can foresee problems if particular BOINC branches perform better than others and are kept as personal copies for one person/team instead of becoming open source. Do the project developers allow that person/team to have an advantage (after all, they put time and effort into creating the new version) over the rest of their crunchers (possibly alienating them and losing them) or disallow it and miss out on more/faster results?

Different versions of BOINC already give project developers headaches trying to cater for the different capabilities of each version, imagine if a new version popped up daily!

Mark