Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio Organizational Changes to Address Growth

[Robert McGwier]

Great stuff  Jonathan.  I look forward to working with you.  Do you think I
will still be here when I am 70?

;-)
Bob


On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Johnathan Corgan 
wrote:

> Most of you already know me, as I’ve been in the GNU Radio community for
> eleven years in various roles, including release manager, integration
> manager, Live SDR developer, infrastructure manager, engineering
> consultant, and technical trainer.  Today I’m happy to move on to the role
> of Chief Architect.
>
> It is an exciting time of transition for GNU Radio.  Recently there has
> been large growth in several areas--growth in our user base, our number of
> contributors, the types of radio applications and computing environments
> that GNU Radio is running in, and hardware vendor support for interfacing
> with GNU Radio applications.
>
> Much of this success comes from the efforts of unpaid volunteer
> contributors whose code they have made freely available to others in the
> community.  This is the nature of open source development, and to a large
> extent this has been accomplished without much formal direction from the
> project.  As the GNU Radio codebase has grown more complex, we’ve seen the
> need for more structured guidance and coordination across development
> efforts.
>
> As Ben has outlined, we’re filling out the new organizational roles of
> Tech Leads, whom we are looking to champion their respective areas of
> development.  This includes:
>
>
>-
>
>Developing a roadmap for feature development and communicating that
>roadmap to the user community and code contributors across the project
>-
>
>Identifying and recruiting individual code contributors
>-
>
>Shepherding feature proposals in their area through the process of
>getting community feedback and clarification
>-
>
>Coordinating code integration in their area of the code tree prior to
>final review and merging
>-
>
>Ensuring support issues and questions in their area of responsibility
>are properly resolved
>
>
> In the next few weeks, Ben and I will be sharing more details about how we
> will fill out the organization and how we will be operating the project and
> the new Foundation.  Key among these are:
>
>
>-
>
>A new process for proposing, getting community feedback on, and
>documenting new (significant) feature development, patterned after the
>Python Improvement Proposal process many of you are already familiar with
>-
>
>A more structured code review, unit testing, integration, and release
>management process
>-
>
>Roadmap-based development tracks that allow better coordination among
>different developers, especially for feature sets that cross organizational
>lines
>-
>
>Improved communication among our globally distributed community and
>developer base
>
>
> As Chief Architect, I’ll be working closely with Ben, our user community,
> and each of our Tech Leads to accomplish these goals.
>
> -Johnathan
>
> ___
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> Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org
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>
>


-- 
Bob McGwier
Founder, Federated Wireless, Inc
Founder and Technical Advisor, HawkEye 360, Inc
Research Professor Virginia Tech
Dir. Research:  The Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and
Technology
Senior Member IEEE, Facebook: N4HYBob, ARS: N4HY
Faculty Advisor Virginia Tech Amateur Radio Assn. (K4KDJ)
Director of AMSAT
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Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio Organizational Changes to Address Growth

[Robert McGwier]

Ben:

Don't forget you are a Hokie too! Good luck!

Bob


On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 6:51 PM, Ben Hilburn  wrote:

> Hi all -
>
> As I mentioned in the thread regarding the website updates, we recently
> discovered that changes to the gnuradio.org DNS caused some MX record
> issues, and many of you didn't actually receive the introduction e-mails
> that Johnathan and I sent out. If you didn't receive them and are
> interested in reading them, you can find them here:
>
>- News Item: http://gnuradio.org/redmine/news/63
>- My Statement:
>http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnuradio/2016-03/msg00349.html
>- Johnathan's Statement:
>http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnuradio/2016-03/msg00350.html
>
> Also, as Martin shared yesterday, we had to postpone the developers' call
> due to travel. The next dev call will be *Thurs 31 March*.
>
> As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to send me a note.
> Thanks!
>
> Cheers,
> Ben
>
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 10:11 AM, Tom Rondeau  wrote:
>
>> I've been running the GNU Radio project for over five years. In this
>> time, we've dramatically expanded its capabilities, prominence, and
>> performance. We have attracted great developers and a fantastic user base.
>> And we have built the highly successful and growing annual GNU Radio
>> conference.
>>
>> I feel that I have accomplished a great deal of what I was hoping to when
>> I took over this role. Part of my job (and much of the fun) was being
>> hands-on with the code almost daily. But there's a lot more to do in GNU
>> Radio, and it is time for a new vision to move it forward to where we see
>> it going next.
>>
>> While I was thinking about this role change, the opportunity arose for me
>> to become a DARPA program manager, which is one of the most exciting
>> opportunities I can imagine. I will still be working on radio,
>> communications, and, of course, software radio, and I still hope to support
>> the project and continue working with the community we have in whatever
>> ways that I can. But this new position gives me an opportunity to pursue
>> engineering, science, technology, and research in areas and ways that I
>> haven't been able to do in my current role.
>>
>> I am pleased to announce our new leadership team, who are already very
>> familiar to many of you. Ben Hilburn will be taking over as Project Lead
>> while Johnathan Corgan will become the Chief Architect in charge of the
>> codebase. They have already been doing a great job of building up their
>> team structure and their vision for the next stages of this project, which
>> is exactly what we need to grow and move the project forward.
>>
>> The transition is already happening, and we can all consider Ben and
>> Johnathan to have taken up their roles today. I will still be actively
>> involved in GNU Radio over the next couple of months until I start my new
>> position at the end of May.
>>
>> You'll be hearing more details from them soon. But I hope that everyone
>> knows how proud I am of this project and what we're doing here as well as
>> my confidence in Ben, Johnathan, and what is coming next.
>>
>> Thank you all!
>>
>> Tom
>>
>>
>> ___
>> Discuss-gnuradio mailing list
>> Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org
>> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
>>
>>
>
> ___
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> Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org
> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
>
>


-- 
Bob McGwier
Founder, Federated Wireless, Inc
Founder and Technical Advisor, HawkEye 360, Inc
Research Professor Virginia Tech
Dir. Research:  The Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and
Technology
Senior Member IEEE, Facebook: N4HYBob, ARS: N4HY
Faculty Advisor Virginia Tech Amateur Radio Assn. (K4KDJ)
Director of AMSAT
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Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio Organizational Changes to Address Growth

[Robert McGwier]

Best of luck to you Tom.  Come visit the Hokies!

Bob
Virginia Tech

On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 10:11 AM, Tom Rondeau  wrote:

> I've been running the GNU Radio project for over five years. In this time,
> we've dramatically expanded its capabilities, prominence, and performance.
> We have attracted great developers and a fantastic user base. And we have
> built the highly successful and growing annual GNU Radio conference.
>
> I feel that I have accomplished a great deal of what I was hoping to when
> I took over this role. Part of my job (and much of the fun) was being
> hands-on with the code almost daily. But there's a lot more to do in GNU
> Radio, and it is time for a new vision to move it forward to where we see
> it going next.
>
> While I was thinking about this role change, the opportunity arose for me
> to become a DARPA program manager, which is one of the most exciting
> opportunities I can imagine. I will still be working on radio,
> communications, and, of course, software radio, and I still hope to support
> the project and continue working with the community we have in whatever
> ways that I can. But this new position gives me an opportunity to pursue
> engineering, science, technology, and research in areas and ways that I
> haven't been able to do in my current role.
>
> I am pleased to announce our new leadership team, who are already very
> familiar to many of you. Ben Hilburn will be taking over as Project Lead
> while Johnathan Corgan will become the Chief Architect in charge of the
> codebase. They have already been doing a great job of building up their
> team structure and their vision for the next stages of this project, which
> is exactly what we need to grow and move the project forward.
>
> The transition is already happening, and we can all consider Ben and
> Johnathan to have taken up their roles today. I will still be actively
> involved in GNU Radio over the next couple of months until I start my new
> position at the end of May.
>
> You'll be hearing more details from them soon. But I hope that everyone
> knows how proud I am of this project and what we're doing here as well as
> my confidence in Ben, Johnathan, and what is coming next.
>
> Thank you all!
>
> Tom
>
>
> ___
> Discuss-gnuradio mailing list
> Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org
> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
>
>


-- 
Bob McGwier
Founder, Federated Wireless, Inc
Founder and Technical Advisor, HawkEye 360, Inc
Research Professor Virginia Tech
Dir. Research:  The Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and
Technology
Senior Member IEEE, Facebook: N4HYBob, ARS: N4HY
Faculty Advisor Virginia Tech Amateur Radio Assn. (K4KDJ)
Director of AMSAT
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Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio Organizational Changes to Address Growth

[Ben Hilburn]

Hi all -

As I mentioned in the thread regarding the website updates, we recently
discovered that changes to the gnuradio.org DNS caused some MX record
issues, and many of you didn't actually receive the introduction e-mails
that Johnathan and I sent out. If you didn't receive them and are
interested in reading them, you can find them here:

   - News Item: http://gnuradio.org/redmine/news/63
   - My Statement:
   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnuradio/2016-03/msg00349.html
   - Johnathan's Statement:
   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnuradio/2016-03/msg00350.html

Also, as Martin shared yesterday, we had to postpone the developers' call
due to travel. The next dev call will be *Thurs 31 March*.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to send me a note.
Thanks!

Cheers,
Ben

On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 10:11 AM, Tom Rondeau  wrote:

> I've been running the GNU Radio project for over five years. In this time,
> we've dramatically expanded its capabilities, prominence, and performance.
> We have attracted great developers and a fantastic user base. And we have
> built the highly successful and growing annual GNU Radio conference.
>
> I feel that I have accomplished a great deal of what I was hoping to when
> I took over this role. Part of my job (and much of the fun) was being
> hands-on with the code almost daily. But there's a lot more to do in GNU
> Radio, and it is time for a new vision to move it forward to where we see
> it going next.
>
> While I was thinking about this role change, the opportunity arose for me
> to become a DARPA program manager, which is one of the most exciting
> opportunities I can imagine. I will still be working on radio,
> communications, and, of course, software radio, and I still hope to support
> the project and continue working with the community we have in whatever
> ways that I can. But this new position gives me an opportunity to pursue
> engineering, science, technology, and research in areas and ways that I
> haven't been able to do in my current role.
>
> I am pleased to announce our new leadership team, who are already very
> familiar to many of you. Ben Hilburn will be taking over as Project Lead
> while Johnathan Corgan will become the Chief Architect in charge of the
> codebase. They have already been doing a great job of building up their
> team structure and their vision for the next stages of this project, which
> is exactly what we need to grow and move the project forward.
>
> The transition is already happening, and we can all consider Ben and
> Johnathan to have taken up their roles today. I will still be actively
> involved in GNU Radio over the next couple of months until I start my new
> position at the end of May.
>
> You'll be hearing more details from them soon. But I hope that everyone
> knows how proud I am of this project and what we're doing here as well as
> my confidence in Ben, Johnathan, and what is coming next.
>
> Thank you all!
>
> Tom
>
>
> ___
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> Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org
> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
>
>
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Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio Organizational Changes to Address Growth

[Marcus D. Leech]

On 03/14/2016 10:11 AM, Tom Rondeau wrote:


I've been running the GNU Radio project for over five years. In this 
time, we've dramatically expanded its capabilities, prominence, and 
performance. We have attracted great developers and a fantastic user 
base. And we have built the highly successful and growing annual GNU 
Radio conference.

[Bunch of stuff deleted for brevity]



I'd just like to chime in and say that Tom, you've done a fantastic job 
over the last five years, along with your "supporting cast".  I hope that
  you thoroughly enjoy your new role in DARPA, and we all expect 
amazing things :)


For Ben, Jonathan, and Nathan, I offer my congratulations, and I know 
you will all do great things.  The ecosystem that Gnu Radio has spawned
  since 2004 is one I think we can all be proud of, and the addition of 
"new blood" at the top can only help!


Thanks everyone involved...



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Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio Organizational Changes to Address Growth

[Eric Blossom]

Congratulations to all of you on this new phase of GNU Radio!

Tom, thanks for all you've done serving as the project lead since I stepped
down some 5 years ago.  I'm happy to hear about your new adventure as a
DARPA PM!

Johnathan and Ben, thanks for all that you've already done for GNU Radio,
and thank you for stepping into these expanded roles!

I looking forward to seeing what the next 5 years brings for GNU Radio!

Best wishes,
Eric
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Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio Organizational Changes to Address Growth

[Johnathan Corgan]

Most of you already know me, as I’ve been in the GNU Radio community for
eleven years in various roles, including release manager, integration
manager, Live SDR developer, infrastructure manager, engineering
consultant, and technical trainer.  Today I’m happy to move on to the role
of Chief Architect.

It is an exciting time of transition for GNU Radio.  Recently there has
been large growth in several areas--growth in our user base, our number of
contributors, the types of radio applications and computing environments
that GNU Radio is running in, and hardware vendor support for interfacing
with GNU Radio applications.

Much of this success comes from the efforts of unpaid volunteer
contributors whose code they have made freely available to others in the
community.  This is the nature of open source development, and to a large
extent this has been accomplished without much formal direction from the
project.  As the GNU Radio codebase has grown more complex, we’ve seen the
need for more structured guidance and coordination across development
efforts.

As Ben has outlined, we’re filling out the new organizational roles of Tech
Leads, whom we are looking to champion their respective areas of
development.  This includes:


   -

   Developing a roadmap for feature development and communicating that
   roadmap to the user community and code contributors across the project
   -

   Identifying and recruiting individual code contributors
   -

   Shepherding feature proposals in their area through the process of
   getting community feedback and clarification
   -

   Coordinating code integration in their area of the code tree prior to
   final review and merging
   -

   Ensuring support issues and questions in their area of responsibility
   are properly resolved


In the next few weeks, Ben and I will be sharing more details about how we
will fill out the organization and how we will be operating the project and
the new Foundation.  Key among these are:


   -

   A new process for proposing, getting community feedback on, and
   documenting new (significant) feature development, patterned after the
   Python Improvement Proposal process many of you are already familiar with
   -

   A more structured code review, unit testing, integration, and release
   management process
   -

   Roadmap-based development tracks that allow better coordination among
   different developers, especially for feature sets that cross organizational
   lines
   -

   Improved communication among our globally distributed community and
   developer base


As Chief Architect, I’ll be working closely with Ben, our user community,
and each of our Tech Leads to accomplish these goals.

-Johnathan
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Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio Organizational Changes to Address Growth

[Ben Hilburn]

Hi all -

I have been involved with GNU Radio for the last seven years or so, and
have always greatly enjoyed being part of the project. I'm continually
impressed by our community, and I have met many of my closest colleagues
through GNU Radio. I’m very happy to now be stepping into this role. Tom
has done an amazing job of leading the project for the last 5+ years, and
I'm honored to pick up the baton from him.

My Role

As part of this leadership transition, Tom's responsibilities are being
split into two distinct roles. My role, Project Lead, is focused on the
organization, project direction & strategy, and external relationships.
Ownership of the GNU Radio code itself is now the responsibility of the Chief
Architect, Johnathan Corgan. Many of you already know Johnathan, and I'll
let him talk about his new role in more detail. In short, if something
touches the codebase, Johnathan is fundamentally responsible. For
everything else, it's me.

The Organization

With a community and project of our size and capability, GNU Radio benefits
greatly from having strong area leaders tackling specific efforts. We are
now formalizing the leadership roles necessary to run a project like GNU
Radio, and have identified key individuals to fill many of them.

[image: GNU Radio Organization.jpg]

Martin Braun's role of Community Manager will stay the same. In this
capacity, Martin will continue to manage community events, outreach, and
our presence in many external venues. Recent examples of Martin's work
include the Hackfest at c-base in Berlin, the SDR Track at FOSDEM, and our
involvement with Google Summer of Code.

In addition to his leadership of Volk, Nathan West has stepped up to fill
Johnathan Corgan's previous role of Release Manager. Nathan has been
managing the release process for GNU Radio over the last few months, and he
will now formally take over the role.

Tech Leads and Working Groups

You probably noticed a new type of leadership role in the image above, Tech
Lead, and the absence of 'Working Groups'. We created the concept of
'Working Groups' in 2013 as a way to bring focused development to a
particular effort within the project or community. After much discussion
post-GRCon16, we believe that this can be better accomplished with a
different leadership structure.

We have identified key technical areas of the project, each of which will
be driven & maintained by a Tech Lead. A Tech Lead is directly responsible
for the GNU Radio code in their area of leadership - you may notice that
the crew of Tech Leads is comprised of people who have established
themselves as core developers of the project. The GNU Radio codebase
contains highly complex algorithms spread across otherwise unrelated fields
- we have both advanced modulation techniques (e.g., OFDM) as well as Qt
GUI code, for example. The Tech Leads are area experts that are responsible
for these more focused & manageable portions of the project.

The Tech Leads are a key part of our software engineering process &
development leadership going forward. As such, I will defer to Johnathan
for further discussion of these topics.

Packaging

Packaging is a critical piece of our project success and growth, and we
have been fortunate to have some excellent and very active maintainers
working on GNU Radio. Going forward, these developers will have recognized
roles within the organization, and Maitland Bottoms, whom many of you have
met at Meetups and GRCons, has taken the role of Tech Lead for the Build
System & Packaging.

Unfilled Roles

As you can see from the image, we also have a number of unfilled roles in
the organization. If you are interested in becoming part of the GNU Radio
leadership, please don't hesitate to get in touch!

The Foundation

As GNU Radio grows into a more mature and professional project, its
organization must do the same to support it. Thus, we are very excited to
announce that we will be incorporating a GNU Radio Foundation. Our goal is
to eventually make the Foundation a proper 501(c)(3) non-profit, but as
that takes considerable time and effort, our first step will be a
corporation that will act under the same guidelines, but without the legal
status as a non-profit.

At the time of its creation, the GNU Radio Foundation will be immediately
responsible for:

   -

   Acting as the contract authority & legally responsible body for the
   organization (e.g., contracts signed in support of GRCon will be in the
   name of the Foundation, not individuals).
   -

   Managing all finances; all expenses come from the Foundation, and all
   revenues go to the Foundation.
   -

   Owning & managing all GNU Radio assets (e.g., domains, logins / access
   rights, PGP keys, IP not assigned to FSF, etc).


Creating the foundation will provide continuity independent of individuals
in the organization, will provide a central authority to manage our assets
and IP, and will act as the legal body representing the organization and
project.

The 

[Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio Organizational Changes to Address Growth

[Tom Rondeau]

I've been running the GNU Radio project for over five years. In this time,
we've dramatically expanded its capabilities, prominence, and performance.
We have attracted great developers and a fantastic user base. And we have
built the highly successful and growing annual GNU Radio conference.

I feel that I have accomplished a great deal of what I was hoping to when I
took over this role. Part of my job (and much of the fun) was being
hands-on with the code almost daily. But there's a lot more to do in GNU
Radio, and it is time for a new vision to move it forward to where we see
it going next.

While I was thinking about this role change, the opportunity arose for me
to become a DARPA program manager, which is one of the most exciting
opportunities I can imagine. I will still be working on radio,
communications, and, of course, software radio, and I still hope to support
the project and continue working with the community we have in whatever
ways that I can. But this new position gives me an opportunity to pursue
engineering, science, technology, and research in areas and ways that I
haven't been able to do in my current role.

I am pleased to announce our new leadership team, who are already very
familiar to many of you. Ben Hilburn will be taking over as Project Lead
while Johnathan Corgan will become the Chief Architect in charge of the
codebase. They have already been doing a great job of building up their
team structure and their vision for the next stages of this project, which
is exactly what we need to grow and move the project forward.

The transition is already happening, and we can all consider Ben and
Johnathan to have taken up their roles today. I will still be actively
involved in GNU Radio over the next couple of months until I start my new
position at the end of May.

You'll be hearing more details from them soon. But I hope that everyone
knows how proud I am of this project and what we're doing here as well as
my confidence in Ben, Johnathan, and what is coming next.

Thank you all!

Tom
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