[CF-metadata] CF sub-tasking?

[Rich Signell]

Brian Eaton wrote:
>  As any
> benevolent dictator in my shoes would do, I will step aside as the lead
> author as soon as someone else is ready to assume that role.  Until that
> time I will continue to maintain the CF home page, making sure the links
> all work and so on.

I think part of the "problem" is that CF has become much more popular, and much 
more important in the atmospheric and oceanic communities!  So there are more 
people clamoring to include increasingly complex functionality to the standard. 
  Having a single person trying to sort through all the suggestions and 
responses and author new revisions is a daunting task, especially for a 
volunteer, as Brian said.

What would the CF gang think about moving to a sort of "subcommittee" approach, 
where different small groups could be responsible for producing draft documents 
that address the areas that have had a lot of recent discussion, for example: 
GIS interfacing, handling of unstructured grids, handling of staggered grids.
I think this could be done in the same informal way that CF has used in the 
past, but these sub-groups might result in more rapid progress, since the 
members would likely have a special interest in seeing these proposals become 
reality.

One might imagine that these different areas might be useful to identify within 
the CF convention itself, as "modules".  Thus a client that worked with CF2.0 
might say it supports the "core" module, but not the "gis" module or the 
"unstructured grid" module.  This would help alleviate the concern that we don't 
  want to make being "CF compliant" too complex.

I think also that the discussion is complex enough that we could really use a 
discussion board that has different topics identified, is searchable, allows 
code revisioning, attachments, etc, but without too much overhead.  Tom Gross 
has suggested Sourceforge, Steve Hankin Bugzilla -  are their other candidates?


-Rich

-- 
Richard P. Signell           rsignell at usgs.gov
U.S. Geological Survey       Phone: (508) 457-2229
384 Woods Hole Road          Fax:   (508) 457-2310
Woods Hole, MA  02543-1598