GNU Radio Organization Changes: Johnathan’s Statement

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:

Identifying and recruiting individual code contributors

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

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

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 Corgan