Index

Overview

Planscape.org is a collaborative landscape planning application platform for wildfire and ecological resilience initiatives. As a shared platform, Planscape.org requires cross organizational governance to ensure that it can continue to be developed and deployed sustainably and in service to its users. This document outlines the roles and responsibilities of the two teams that work together to advance Planscape.org’s development: the Governance Team and the Stewarding Organization.
Once approved by the Governance Team, the most recent governance documentation and other key documents will be available at Planscape.org and on the Planscape GitHub Project Page.

Roles and Responsibilities

Governance Team

The Governance Team guides overall project direction and works directly with the Stewarding Organization to support development and resolve issues. They seek consensus approval on certain key decisions (such as vision, guiding principles, and licensing), but are not responsible for day-to-day minor decisions associated with project development and maintenance. Governance Team responsibilities include:

Review and approve principles, guidelines, and vision documents which shape the overall direction and philosophy of the project.
Review and approve other proposals for major technical, organizational, or project-related decisions as brought forward by the Stewarding Organization.
Review and approve communications and marketing plans.
Define the criteria for Governance Team membership and approve the addition or removal of Governance Team members.
Establish additional committees as needed, delegate responsibilities to them, and disband them when necessary.
Determine open-source licensing, attribution, and acknowledgment requirements, and help resolve licensing/copyright issues.
Support delivery of training and technical assistance for users.
Coordinate resourcing and funding for Planscape.org development and delivery.

Current Governance Team Membership

Patrick Wright, California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force
Lisa Lien-Mager, California Natural Resources Agency
Matthew Reischman, CAL FIRE
Juliann Aukema, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station
Sherry Hazelhurst, USDA Forest Service, Region 5
Danny Lee, USDA Forest Service, Washington Office
Mark Finney, Rocky Mountain Research Station
Erin Hattersley, Google.org
John Battles, Task Force Science Advisory Panel Co-Chair (Non-voting)
Steve Ostoja, Task Force Science Advisory Panel Co-Chair (Non-voting)

Stewarding Organization

The Stewarding Organization (currently Spatial Informatics Group) is funded by one or more collaborating organizations to manage Planscape.org’s development and operations in accordance with the guidance of the Governance Team. The Stewarding Organization role may be fulfilled by other organizations in the future and is decided through the collective decision-making of the Governance Team and funded by one or more collaborating organizations. Funders may select multiple organizations to contribute to the project’s stewardship and development as needed. Planscape.org may require additional resources to support integrating and managing additional stewards. Stewarding Organization responsibilities include:

1. Staffing and managing the project’s development team.
2. Scoping and developing features in alignment with the project’s principles, guidelines, and vision.
3. Conducting user research to ensure detailed needs are captured across organizations.
4. Providing proposals for review and potential approval to the Governance Team.
5. Participating in Governance Team meetings including by providing updates and elevating emerging issues.
6. Facilitating project management and decision-making processes across collaborating organizations.

Core Development Principles

Planscape’s code is in the public domain. There is one canonical codebase, hosted on GitHub. Any organization that wishes to deploy a separate instance of the application will need to specify their own configuration settings and manage their own servers.

Collaborating organizations should aim to not fork the code, and should instead contribute features to the shared core codebase through the collective planning and decision-making process described in this document. Any collaborating organization that forks the codebase to implement features separately from the canonical codebase will have effectively created a separate application and codebase, and is solely responsible for maintaining and operating that separate application. When needs arise for custom behavior, the project should aim to support that behavior through generic integration and software design techniques such as application programming interfaces (APIs) and/or plugin systems rather than including instance specific code in Planscape.