Terms of Reference for the CF Committee and Governance Panel

The CF metadata standard is designed to benefit its user community. The community at large is invited to contribute to the development of the conventions and the standard names by participating in online discussions, attending meetings, proposing changes, or taking part in any other way they deem appropriate and useful. Community members participate on a best-effort basis and have no responsibility to fulfil. The governance arrangements described in this document are intended to organise and facilitate the work of the CF community.

The CF Governance Panel governs the development and maintenance of the CF standard on behalf of the user community, under the auspices of the WMO/WCRP Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM). If the WGCM wishes to transfer or share responsibility for CF with another permanent committee of an international organisation, it may decide to do so with the agreement of the CF Governance Panel and the CF committee.

The panel will include, but not be limited to, members of the WGCM, the leaders or their nominees of organisations contributing significant resources in support of CF, and the chair of the CF committee.

The panel will be responsible for the stewardship of CF, but will not have any special responsibility for or influence on the technical content of CF.

The panel will ensure that its own constitution and terms of reference, those of the CF committee, and the aims and general principles of design of the CF standard are published. These may be altered by the panel only after appropriate public debate and with the agreement of the CF committee.

The panel will promote and help integrate the use of CF across WCRP programmes, the broader programmes of WCRP’s sponsors (ICSU, WMO, and IOC), and other interested communities. In particular the panel will attempt to influence developing metadata standards of WMO and other international organisations so that they accommodate the CF standard.

The panel will encourage continued support of CF by benevolent organisations and explore additional funding mechanisms if necessary.

The panel will appoint people who have nominated themselves or agreed to serve as members of the CF committee. In doing so it will have regard to the expertise and interests relevant to the remit the committee and will attempt to obtain representation of a variety of communities and a geographical spread of members. The maximum and minimum numbers of members of the committee is decided by agreement between the committee and the panel. The panel will ensure that the current membership of the committee is published.

The panel will convene an annual meeting of the CF community.

Anyone with sufficient time, interest and expertise is qualified to serve as an ordinary member of the CF committee. Prospective ordinary members should nominate themselves to the CF panel. Committee members judged by the panel to have been inactive for an extended period will be asked to resign. Members may choose to resign at any time and must retire after five years, but may be reappointed.

The committee will elect its own chair from among its ordinary members whenever the position becomes vacant. The chair of the committee may resign the office at any time and must retire after three years, but may be reelected.

The committee has authority and responsibility for the CF standard, as detailed in its terms of reference, having regard to the aims and general principles of design of CF.

The committee will be assisted in its responsibility by two permanent and funded members of staff, who will be appointed in a manner decided by the CF Governance Panel, and who will be ex-officio members and secretaries of the committee. The manager of CF conventions will be the secretary for the conventions and the manager of CF standard names will be the secretary for the standard names committee. The committee will propose priorities for work by its secretaries.

The committee may not devolve responsibility for the CF standard to other bodies, but it may encourage the formation of other permanent or temporary ad-hoc groups to debate issues and propose developments to CF.

The committee may not change its constitution or terms of reference itself, but may propose changes to be made by the CF Governance Panel.

The membership of the committee should include, but need not be limited to, representatives of those who maintain widely used software which follows the CF conventions, especially those which the committee regards as reference implementations, and representatives of the various scientific user communities of the CF standard.

The committee will be responsible for the CF conventions constituting the CF netCDF standard, the definition of CF standard names and of any other aspects of controlled vocabulary, and the format and maintenance of the standard name table.

The committee will be responsible for the CF conformance document and for deciding what CF conformance means.

The committee will have an interest in implementation of CF metadata conventions corresponding to the CF standard in other file formats and media apart from netCDF.

The committee will have an interest in working towards interoperability with other vocabulary maintainers.

The committee will ensure that appropriate means are made available for making proposals and carrying out debates in a way which is visible and open to participation by all interested parties, and for retaining a permanent public record of debates and of any decisions made.

The committee will ensure that the standard, any supporting documents and resources, and the procedures for proposing and deciding changes are kept up-to-date and made publicly available.