Today at 12:45 in Bethe is the operations meeting of the Boost Community Library Maintainence team. In advance of that meeting I'd like to render my proposal on this list so I have it written down. Premise:The library maintainence team does not and will likely never have sufficient resources to maintain libraries without current maintainers. Proposal: a) The CMT will solicit volunteers to take over maintainence of specific libraries. b) The most likely source of such volunteers are those working in companies which use and depend upon the libraries in maintainence. Such companies will be expected to support the library maintainence by permitting the maintainer to undertake this effort using company time and resources. c) Since we don't have a list of which companies are using which libraries, we will send a solicitation to volunteer to every person who has posted a bug report for the library in question on the TRAC system. I believe this is the most likely source for prospective maintainers. d) Companies that support maintainence of a particular library will be permited to place their logo and link on the TRAC page for that library. So they will receive the following benefits from sponsoring the maintainece of the library. 1) They will be demonstrating their commitment to the high standard of software development that Boost supports. 2) By placing their logo and link on the track page, they will be encouraging and facilitating prospective employees who desire to work for such an organization to contact them. That is, they will have a leg up on attracting the highest quality C++ programmers. 3) They will be guarenteed timely and rigorous maintainence of the library which they depend on. 4) They will have the inside track on proposing and implementing any library enhancements that they desire. 5) They will benefit from collaboration of the boost community which provides numerous valuable benefits: Bug fixes submitted by users, suggestions for enhancements. etc. The value of all these benefits to the sponsoring company will far, far out weigh the incremental cost of the employee time. In many cases, since employees have to maintain the library anyway - the incremental cost is zero anyway. This moves the responsibility for library maintainence to those most willing and able to undertake it. The role of the CMT would be to promote, recruit, certify, and monitor library maintainence. The CMT would have the authority to move the responsability from maintainer to another. The current practice of having a single person/entity responsible for maintainence of a library would continue unchanged. Robert Ramey