The Galaxy Governance Model
Galaxy is a mature, successful research software infrastructure project, with a large and diverse global audience. Evolving project governance structures are needed to help adapt to increasing complexity and to more fully engage the Galaxy Community.
Several community groups have been formed so that project governance truly reflects the global community that Galaxy has become.
Project Mission Statement
The Galaxy Project is a global open science collaboration, providing free access to shareable, reproducible, transparent, best practice data intensive analysis for all researchers.
In support of this mission, project activities include maintaining source code, documentation, data analysis tools, training resources, analysis services, technical support, and an inclusive, self-governing community.
Galaxy Technical Board (GTB)
The GTB is a governance structure representing Galaxy Working Groups (WGs) that coordinate work and communication within topic-focused teams in the Galaxy Ecosystem. The WGs and the GTB are focussed on technical development, managing important project infrastructure assets including source code and software releases, and interacting with the community. WGs are self-organised, and the lead(s) serve on the GTB. The GTB contributes to the roadmap, especially by providing technical input, coordinating, and communicating its implementation.
Read more about Galaxy Working Groups.
Galaxy Community Board (GCB)
The GCB is a committee representing Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that are not primarily technical in nature (such as the existing Proteomics and Microbial communities), engaging in capacity building, toolkit development and training. The GCB will provide a supportive virtual forum for the exchange of ideas. It will organise and manage its own agenda and work, including arranging meetings and asynchronous discussions. The agenda might include planning new initiatives; supporting ongoing development; managing coherent, community owned proposals and responses in the roadmap processes and other important Project decision making.
Galaxy Executive Board (GEB)
The GEB is the top-level community governance structure, responsible for the overall direction and coordination of project activities, to ensure coherence, efficiency, integrity, growth, and long term sustainability. Board responsibilities include providing authoritative project-wide, external representation; leadership in scientific, technical, governance and community development goals; supporting communication and global activity coordination for efficient use of resources and timely completion of milestones; and arbitration among collaborators, users and communities.
Project Management Office (PMO)
Keywords: Project management, support, coordination, international opportunities, roadmap, coc, well-being, community
The Project Management Office (PMO) supports the different bodies in the governance model, ensuring that the information flows through them, keeping an open corporate knowledge and helping to build bridges between such bodies.
Code of Conduct
All of these groups, and all aspects of the Galaxy Community, are bound by the Galaxy Code of Conduct.
Proposed Galaxy governance and planning structure
Proposed governance workflow:
Idea by Björn Grüning, Hans-Rudolf Hotz and others.
In addition to their self-governance and collaboration, these boards interact with each other to build the annual Galaxy roadmap:
The Technical Board and the Community Board are periodically asked for high-level input, representing the interests of the wider Galaxy community.
The Galaxy Executive Board reviews suggestions and creates a final high-level roadmap (1 week).
This roadmap is then given to the Technical Board which will (3 weeks):
- Add technical details.
- Estimate the timings.
- Add cross working group dependencies.
- Add other requirements (e.g. hardware).
- A detailed roadmap is given to the Galaxy Executive Board for the final decision (1 week).
The Galaxy Executive Board signs off the roadmap and publishes it on GitHub.