Governance

HydroShare is a hydrologic information system operated by The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Inc. (CUAHSI) that enables users to share and publish data and models in a variety of flexible formats, and to make this information available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner.

Founded in 2001, the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) is a 501(c)3 research organization representing more than 130 U.S. universities and international water science-related organizations. CUAHSI is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop infrastructure and services for the advancement of water science in the United States.

CUAHSI is governed by a Board of Directors elected by and from the Membership and managed by the Executive Committee of the Board and its Officers. More information on Board of Directors and by-laws that govern CUAHSI can be found here.

The CUAHSI Board of Directors receives guidance from Standing Committees made up of leading scientists and educators within the water science community. The CUAHSI Informatics Standing Committee serves as an advisory board for ongoing HydroShare development.  The CUAHSI User Committee is a subcommittee of the Informatics Standing Committee and serves to provide input on user needs, usability of HydroShare functionality.

HydroShare code is open source and generally uses the BSD-3-Clause license, though some parts may have different licenses. Development is managed on Github (https://github.com/hydroshare) with 30 HydroShare related repositories (as of April, 2017) coordinated by NSF Principal Investigators, grant funded researchers and developers, and staff at the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) and Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI).

The HydroShare system is hosted at RENCI in their data center on equipment that was purchased with NSF project funding to support the development of HydroShare.  The system has 50 TB of storage on servers running iRODS - the data management system used. The iRODS Consortium provides support through membership and on contract with partners (including Intel, IBM, Dell and university and computing institutes from around the world). There is an additional 50 TB in an offsite location used for backup and disaster recovery, in case the RENCI facility is compromised.