Organization and Governance
Our open-source codes are covered by a standard 3-clause BSD license. PDFs with our policies on governance, distribution, development practices, and policies are available: https://github.com/CICE-Consortium/About-Us.
Our Distribution Policy protects intellectual property rights for shared development code before it is released via a public repository.
Community collaboration has been critical for development of the CICE model. In late 2016 a core group of CICE developers stood up an interagency and international CICE Consortium to enhance sea ice model development throughout the sea ice community. This consortium formalizes longstanding collaborations and makes our connections with the operational community explicit in our goals of accelerating both scientific development and the transfer of new developments into operational models. Each agency provides in-kind support through FTE contributions to the Consortium.
The Consortium is in the blue box. Research and Development occurs outside the Consortium, in the community, and the Consortium provides a pathway and support for contributions from the community (including Consortium Members themselves) by coordinating code improvements and confidence testing on which agencies can base decisions for code acceptance in their models. Scientific review is done by the community in publicly accessible (released) code, leading to further development.
The organizational chart for the Consortium shows the Executive Oversight Board in tan, Lead and Co-lead Coordinators and the Software Engineer in blue, and the six Teams with Team Leads in green.
The colored boxes indicate more of an oversight or coordinating role. Team leads coordinate work to be done by that team and with other teams as needed, while the Lead Coordinator and Software Engineer provide overall guidance and assistance. Responsibility for the “hands-on” work resides in the white task boxes and includes consulting with contributors, testing changes, reading code, looking for efficiency gains, improving user friendliness, etc. for code changes generated within the Consortium and for contributed code.
New code contributions must have already undergone testing (grey box), but coordination with other Teams should also have occurred during the development process.
The column package portion of the code is 'Icepack'. The dynamical core is 'CICEdyn' and the rest of the CICE model, including infrastructure and CICEdyn but not Icepack, is 'CICEcore'.