In a few places, I raised the possibility of establishing 3D Slicer foundation that would oversee the long-term planning and development of 3D Slicer. Foundation can possibly raise funds (donations, subscriptions, grants) to contract individual developers in a more coordinated way, and serve other purposes (training activities, documentation) as well.
We are getting big and quite diverse, and I am not sure if this model of developing things piecemeal based on existing grant funded projects will continue to serve us well in the future.
For any such foundation I would assume at first Brigham and Women’s Hospital would have to be on board with the idea as the Slicer license specifically states the Slicer project is maintained by them. @pieper You would probably know about the BWH relationship the most and how much they are technically the leader/organizer of the Slicer project?
Legal stuff may be the biggest thing in the way of the creation of a foundation and there would have to be someone to champion that effort before and after creation.
@muratmaga What do you see as the main purpose of it? The funding aspect or the organization/prioritization of features and improvements?
Do you have any suggestions to the existing Slicer Hangout Meeting to better organize developer’s open-source activities?
I briefly discussed this with Juan Ruiz yesterday (ULPGC, organizer of winter project weeks), and he said that he and Ron Kikinis mulled over this idea several years ago, and the conclusion was that finding funding for the foundation would be problematic so the effort stopped there at the time.
Ron is from BWH, and all this started from his lab, so he would be the person to involve. Also Kitware, since they provide all the infrastructure maintenance and updates since the beginning. Also Gabor Fichtinger, since his lab produced the majority of new Slicer core features in the last decade. And Juan Ruiz, due to the involvement in the community and one of the commercial Slicer partners (Ebatinca). And obviously Steve Pieper as the architect, and also a commercial partner (Isomics).
From the Ebatinca side I can claim that we have been considering more involvement and support for the Slicer core (and possibly Plus and VTK) since the birth of the company, but we still haven’t reached the level of stability to seriously commit. We are optimistic and this may happen in the next year.
So I think having a meeting with these actors could be a good first step. Maybe a breakout at the PW, as all of them usually participate in the winter project week.
Hi Murat,
Thanks for pointing out the POSE program. This is very interesting. I will initiate some internal discussions. Would you be up for scheduling a Zoom on this topic?
Best
Ron