Ending the Steering Committee experiment

[bfabio]

I'm ending the Steering Committee experiment.

We started it in 2021 (#108) to attract participation from public administrations, by giving them a vote.

In practice it's down to two active voters. Denmark left (#284), Germany and Israel were removed for inactivity (#285, #286) and France hasn't voted this year. So evidently it doesn't work.

Maybe the administrations aren't interested, are fine with how things are or don't want to take part this way. Either way, a committee of two isn't much of a committee.

Neither adoption nor decisions ever depended on the committee. publiccode.yml is used by national and European catalogs, including some that never had a seat. And the project never needed a committee to make decisions. What it could use instead is resources and people working on it.

From now on publiccode.yml works like any other open source project. Anyone can propose changes and discuss them, and the maintainers review and merge them. That's pretty much how it already works, minus the weeks of delay and the voting overhead. The committee is superfluous.

The minimum we expect from catalog maintainers is to tell us whether and how they use the standard, so we can keep a list of adopters.

I'll update the charter and the procedure to match. Thanks to the committee members who contributed over the years.

[bzg]

I've left DINUM in october 2025 so I could not represent France anymore.

I'm sorry that nobody in France continued the work. Thanks for the experiment.

[bfabio]

Thanks, Bastien no need to apologize. I really appreciate the time and effort you put into this. You're always welcome to stay involved in a personal capacity.

[dptdgi]

Dear @bfabio,

in the recent developments and discussions concerning the governance and evolution of publiccode.yml (see #384), we have raised the matter with the relevant stakeholders within DTD in order to define an official position.

At this stage, DTD no longer considers the current governance model sufficiently reliable to support Italy’s continued operational dependence on the project.

In particular, we are concerned by the concentration of decision-making responsibilities and by significant changes being introduced without adequate consultation or consideration of the concerns raised by participating institutions and contributors.

For a public administration, changes to a specification such as publiccode.yml may have operational, technical and administrative consequences.

We therefore believe that its evolution requires a transparent and predictable governance model, with appropriate consultation of the public institutions relying on it.

This concern has also emerged internally in relation to the impact that upstream changes can have on established PA processes.

Consequently, the Italian software catalogue will continue to rely on publiccode.yml starting from version 0.7, while maintaining a DTD-managed fork that can evolve according to Italian requirements and ensure the necessary stability and continuity.

The Public Code Editor and the other related tools maintained by DTD will consequently evolve in line with this version.

As open source projects, they will of course remain available for reuse and further development by the broader community.

This decision should not be interpreted as a withdrawal from international cooperation.

On the contrary, DTD remains fully open to collaborating with public institutions, developers and other stakeholders interested in evolving the publiccode.yml format and its supporting tools through an open, transparent and sustainable governance model.

Our objective remains to support an evolution of publiccode.yml capable of accommodating different national and institutional requirements, ideally within a coordinated European framework.

The DTD-maintained forks will be available starting from here: https://github.com/orgs/italia/repositories?q=publiccode

Best regards,

[tomootes]

@dptdgi, @bfabio,

For me, as a person who invested quite some time in advocating for the standard within my country, I truly pity the outcome of the events that have taken place. I do understand the developments from all involved parties. To me, this underlines the need for a clear policy on voting for new versions. I really hope we can resolve this situation anytime soon.