WIP context and problem statement

Co-authored-by: Joseph H Kennedy <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: danielfromearth <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Amy Steiker <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Jessica Scheick <[email protected]>

Author: 5 people

docs/governance/decisions/929-move-repository.md

@@ -9,6 +9,50 @@ Technical Story: [#929 Move or fork to independent organization](https://github.
 
 ## Context and Problem Statement
 
+`earthaccess` currently lives under the `nsidc` organization.
+
+While the `earthaccess` community lives under the ownership of a private
+organization, GitHub's design prevents us from administrating our project
+independently.
+For example, we require organization owner permission for certain actions, teams are managed at the organization level, and our project is mixed with a large number of other projects (making it less discoverable).
+
+Moving the `earthaccess` repo to another GitHub organization will:
+
+* Reduce friction to collaboration by allowing us to self-determine our
+  community members' access and privileges.
+* Improve discoverability by reducing the amount of irrelevant items
+  when browsing for related projects.
+* Enable bundling related repositories (e.g. the R earthdatalogin project, other
+  dependency libraries) under the same org, for example to cross-document project.
+* Preserve community's ability to make its own decisions independent of
+  institutional structure and policy.
+
+Overall: enhance collaboration, efficiency, and longevity
+In order to strengthen the community engagement of earthaccess and lower participation barriers, moving to a
+
+Bullets from presentation to ESDIS on 2/11/2025:
+- Accelerate development via broader participation
+- Lower the cost:value even further for ESDIS
+- Promote NASA’s partners
+
+* Co-location with other similar projects (including similar resources in other languages, e.g. R and Julia)
+* Meeting users where they are
+* Increase visibility, ability to promote, bring awareness to a broader community (e.g. Pangeo showcase)
+* Meets NASA Open Source Science goals 
+* Leveraging NUMFocus sponsorship could allow for Google Summer of Code mentorship and other funding/effort contributions
+* Promotes NASA’s partnerships with other community members based on shared goals, by actively recognizing the critical * contributions of those members.
+* From some Googling:
+* Flexibility
+* Rapid innovation
+* Improved security through rapid bug fixes
+* Transparency and trust
+* Cost efficiency
+* Development driver by the user community
+* While inter-community support reduces ESDIS/NASA required support, we acknowledge that increased ESDIS funding will also help us sustain the library
+hips with other community members based on shared goals
+- Increase sustainability
+
+
 
 ## Considered Options
 
@@ -30,4 +74,4 @@ Move to an independent org, e.g. `earthaccess-dev`.
 
 ### Option 3
 
-Move to a sponsor / incubator org, e.g. `pangeo`.
+Move to a sponsor / incubator org, e.g. `pangeo`.