Proposed updates to the 2021 Collaborative Governance model

[Anders-Markvardsen]

This PR aims to update several of the concerns and observation noted from conversations leading up to, during and following the Nov 2025 User Meeting. It is unlikely to address all, which future amendments can iterate on. A session during the User Meeting was dedicated to discussing aspects of this, see here for slides presented and answers from the audience for questions posed using the Sildo software tool.

It is observed that:

• For 4+ years the Scientific Working Group (SWG) has not been operating, and by extended neither the Steering Committee. This means that anyone reading the current and 2021 governance model gets the wrong impression of the collaborative mantid governance.
• Also, many ideas for improving, in particular, Mantid’s user communication between facilities have been proposed. A subset of these were captured using Slido during the User Meeting, see here.

This PR’s main proposed changes are:

• Make the governance model less coupled. The present model couples the SWG and the TWG and these are strongly coupled with the Steering Committee. Hence the fact that the SWG is not operating means by extension that the Steering Committee is not running either. The one body which is still running, and running well, is the TWG – although not fully as stated in the present governance model which e.g. state that the TWG will include the chair of the SWG.
• The TWG is working well and therefore proposed to keep. The main proposed TWG word change (in addition to removing the dependency on SWG) is to reflect a comment from Pete P in a chat I had with him before the Nov User Meeting, where he described the roadmap that the TWG maintains as the ‘committed roadmap’, where ‘committed’ means committed to be resourced by at least one facility - and hence in this PR suggests to refer to this roadmap as the Committed Collaborative Roadmap (CCR).
• The SWG has not been operating for 4+ years – yet Mantid has continued to move forward and getting used by more operating beamlines. It was meant to own the 5 year common scientific roadmap, which in my personal opinion is a hugely time consuming and complex task. The proposed change is to remove all reference to common roadmaps in the governance document except for the CCR (the CCR also includes committed scientific focussed work items). Based on feedback to date it is proposed that the SWG is removed from the governance model.
• However, what was clear from the Nov User Meeting was the desire for more User Meetings and other forms of better sharing between facilities on user facing needs. Many ideas for the later was given including see Slido responses from the User meeting from Richard W, Rémi etc. Hence, there is a need to have something that champions this. This PR proposes a first stab at a WG for this with the name User Communication Working Group (UCWG).
• As with the SWG the Steering Committee has not been operating for 4+ years, and it is here proposed to be removed too. One of its responsibilities was to nominate a Chairs of the User Meeting, which instead it is proposed the is owned by the UCWG. Another was to “Coordinate the review of the governance and associated documents.” - this particular task, and only this task, is instead proposed to be owned by a dedicated WG for this with the proposed name Governance Model Working Group – its job to avoid the governance model become out of date again and also could be a feeding ground for improvements to it.
• Smaller changes include expanded the section on General Responsibilities of WG, collated info on how to become a member and added a content index...

Before this PR is merged or soon thereafter the following steps are required:

• Identify names for any new working groups that this PR approve.
• Clean up, delete or deprecate in this repo and associated repos (probably just mantidproject/roadmap: Mantid project roadmap) any areas that are no longer needed or needs modifying based on what is approved with the PR. For instance, for the roadmap repo mantidproject/roadmap: Mantid project roadmap potentially it might be
  • Deleted. It currently serves no purpose other than pointing to View 1 · Mantid project roadmap.
  • Update it and keep a more lightweight version of it, which rather than pdfs that go out-of-date, contains links to collaborative and any other publicly accessible local facility roadmaps that may exist. In this context, Tom Hampton in Slido answer pointed towards “At ISIS we now have a public GitHub project per release that contains ALL the work that is currently being worked on by the "core workstream". People are welcome to keep an eye on that.” that may be useful to link here with an explanation of what it is.
• Update section “Local Contributing Facility from ILL”

Approval of this PR is required by (via the GitHub PR function or other means):

• TWG
• At least one person with noticable Mantid responsibilities from each of the current Contributing Facilities

[Anders-Markvardsen]

Updated Mantid Collaborative Governance Model - Jan 2026.docx

See attached for Jan 2026 Word proposed version of the gov model. This is taking inputs from the Dec 2025 TWG meeting, subsequently from Olexsandr, ISIS inst sci David V and Steve C, Sarah F, Martyn G and Sam J.

Some of this feedback has been merged into the gov model .md file in this PR. However, a large feedback for further simplifying the gov model is included in the attached "Updated.Mantid.Collaborative.Governance.Model.-.Jan.2026.docx" , which propose further simplifying the gov model to only have one other body - other than the TWG - in the attached named Project Working Group. The main question for the TWG on Tuesday is, if this Jan 2026 model is a more realistic gov model, i.e. a model that is realistically going to be adhered too? Another option could be just leave the TWG and mention of no other bodies in the gov model. On Tuesday in TWG meeting, and before potentially updating the *.md with text in "Updated.Mantid.Collaborative.Governance.Model.-.Jan.2026.docx", feedback welcome, thanks

[Anders-Markvardsen]

See attached Feb 2026 which includes inputs from the Jan TWG meeting and inputs from Richard W
Updated.Mantid.Collaborative.Governance.Model.- Feb.2026.docx