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Governance Structure
We envision community-driven governance for the benchmark, drawing inspiration from successful models used by other scientific software communities such as BIDS, including a steering committee for making decisions. In particular, our initial draft for the governance model goes as follows:
The Steering Committee assumes decision-making authority progressively over the award period. During Years 1 and 2 the PI leads development with advisory input from committee members, who serve as a Founding Steering Committee appointed at project inception. During Years 3 and 4, one half of the committee seats are opened each year to community election, while the remaining members continue under fixed transitional terms, and the committee takes increasing responsibility for roadmap decisions and policy questions. By Year 5, all seats are held by elected members and the committee assumes full operational authority, with the PI transitioning to an advisory role. This gradual transition ensures that governance capacity develops alongside the technical infrastructure and that stewardship transitions smoothly to the broader community.
The governance model explicitly addresses the challenge of maintaining infrastructure across the inevitable transitions in personnel that occur over multi-year timescales. Committee membership will consist of staggered two-year terms, with elections held annually to replace half of the seats through community nomination and vote, following the governance model established by the BIDS Steering Group. Founding members may stand for election when their transitional terms expire, but are not guaranteed continuation, ensuring a shift from appointed to community-elected governance. Documentation will specify not only current procedures but also the rationale behind them, enabling future governance participants to adapt procedures as circumstances change while maintaining alignment with the founding principles. New members will be nominated by community participants and elected by open community vote, ensuring that the Steering Committee remains responsive to the broader research community’s needs. This attention to governance sustainability reflects lessons learned from infrastructure projects that achieved technical success but struggled to maintain community coordination as founding personnel moved on.
Decision-making follows a consensus model with documented procedures for handling disagreements. The BIDS governance framework provides tested approaches, including formal proposal processes, comment periods, and voting procedures when consensus cannot be reached. Adapting these approaches to the specific needs of EEG-behavioral data infrastructure will be an explicit focus of the governance development process, with the first hackathon dedicating a full track to governance documentation and process testing.
Feedback is highly welcome before we freeze the benchmark governance structure :)