Project Governance#
The purpose of this document is to formalize the governance process used by the AVNI project and to clarify how decisions are made and how the various elements of our community interact. This document elucidates the relationship between open source collaborative development and work that may be funded by entities that require private development.
The Project#
The AVNI software ecosystem (The Project) is designed to be an open source
software project. The goal of The Project is to develop open source software for
analysis of geoscience data in Python. The Project is released under the GNU GPL
v3 (or similar) license, and is hosted publicly
under the globalseismology GitHub organization.
The Project is developed by a team of distributed developers, called Contributors. Contributors are individuals who have contributed code, documentation, designs, or other work to the Project. Anyone can be a Contributor. Contributors can be affiliated with any legal entity or none. Contributors participate in the project by submitting, reviewing, and discussing GitHub Pull Requests and Issues and participating in open and public Project discussions on GitHub and other channels. The foundation of Project participation is openness and transparency.
The Project Community consists of all Contributors and Users of the Project. Contributors work on behalf of and are responsible to the larger Project Community and we strive to keep the barrier between Contributors and Users as low as possible.
The Project is not a legal entity, nor does it currently have any formal relationships with legal entities.
Community Effort#
AVNI software ecosystem (The Project) is part of the wider community effort to create a three-dimensional reference Earth model REM3D. The Project aims to provide tools that reduce the barrier of entry for the adoption of Earth models and datasets. A description of the REM3D project is provided in 12, and a complete list of relevant papers is provided below:
- 1
P Moulik, V Lekic, B Romanowicz, Z Ma, A Schaeffer, T Ho, E Beucler, E Debayle, A Deuss, S Durand, G Ekström, S Lebedev, G Masters, K Priestley, J Ritsema, K Sigloch, J Trampert, and A M Dziewonski. Global reference seismological data sets: multimode surface wave dispersion. Geophysical Journal International, 228(3):1808–1849, 10 2021. doi:10.1093/gji/ggab418.
- 2
P Moulik and The 3D Reference Earth Model (REM3D) Consortium. Three-dimensional Reference Earth Model Project: Data, Techniques, Models & Tools. American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, Chicago, IL, USA, 2022. doi:10.5281/zenodo.7883683.
BibTeX for REM3D
@article{MoulikEtAl2021,
doi = {10.1093/gji/ggab418},
issn = {0956-540X},
journal = {Geophysical Journal International},
month = {10},
number = {3},
pages = {1808-1849},
title = {{Global reference seismological data sets: multimode surface wave dispersion}},
volume = {228},
year = {2021},
author = {Moulik, P and Lekic, V and Romanowicz, B and Ma, Z and Schaeffer, A and Ho, T and Beucler, E and Debayle, E and Deuss, A and Durand, S and Ekström, G and Lebedev, S and Masters, G and Priestley, K and Ritsema, J and Sigloch, K and Trampert, J and Dziewonski, A M}}
@misc{REM3D_AGU_2022,
abstract = {{Reconciliation of techniques, models and data has emerged as a frontier area for deep Earth exploration. Past results have proven indispensable for assessing earthquake hazard, characterizing plate tectonics, elucidating material properties under extreme conditions, imaging interior structure, and as a general reference in other fields. We present advancements on a three-dimensional reference Earth model (REM3D) that captures the consensus view of heterogeneity in the mantle. Progress in modeling the Earth’s interior is driven by diverse data, ranging from astronomic-geodetic constraints to full seismic waveforms and derivative measurements of body waves (~ 1 – 20s), surface waves (~ 20 – 300s) and normal modes (~ 250 – 3000s). Reconciliation of data involves retrieving the missing metadata, archiving in scalable storage formats, documenting outliers indicative of the limitations in some techniques, and quantifying summary reference data with uncertainties. Building on our recent work on reference surface-wave dispersion datasets, arrival times of primary, diffracted, and reflected phases from the transition-zone and deeper discontinuities are reconciled for a body-wave reference dataset. This procedure involves revised techniques and archival formats for the processing of frequency-dependent arrival times. A revised dataset of normal-mode eigenfrequencies, quality factors and splitting is reconciled with updated uncertainties based on inter-catalog consistencies. Full-spectrum tomography uses these diverse observations to constrain physical properties – seismic velocity, anisotropy, density, attenuation and the topography of discontinuities – in variable spatial resolution. This technique is expanded to include long-wavelength geoid as an additional constraint on density variations. All geoscience workflows typically involve querying data or models in order to make inferences. Analysis and Visualization toolkit for plaNetary Inferences (AVNI) is a web-based software environment powered by Python that facilitates these computational workflows. AVNI tools are web-based so that the shared resources are accessed by authenticated users through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), without the overhead of storing data, compiling and running intensive codes.}},
author = {Moulik, P and
The 3D Reference Earth Model (REM3D) Consortium},
title = {{Three-dimensional Reference Earth Model Project:
Data, Techniques, Models \& Tools}},
howpublished = {American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, Chicago, IL, USA},
date-added = {2022-06-07 18:05:07 -0400},
date-modified = {2022-06-07 18:07:23 -0400},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.7883683},
year = {2022}}While AVNI is a distinct project from REM3D, the avenues of community pariticipation are similar. In order to maximize the likelihood of success and utility to the broader deep Earth community, the REM3D project receives input from two advisory working groups, one focused on the reference dataset, and the other on the reference model. Both working groups provide feedback and data to the REM3D project theough various channels.
Governance model#
This section describes the governance and leadership model of The Project.
The foundations of Project governance are:
openness and transparency
active contribution
institutional neutrality
Traditionally, Project leadership is provided by a subset of Contributors, informally called Core Developers, whose active and consistent contributions were rewarded by granting them “commit rights” to the Project GitHub repositories. In general, all Project decisions are made through consensus among the Core Developers with input from the Community.
Document history#
License#
To the extent possible under law, the authors have waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to the AVNI project governance document, as per the terms of our license.