# ProtVista Advisory Board Terms of Reference

Project Title: Improving ProtVista: Sustainability, Usability, and Community for Protein Research Tools  
Funder / Scheme: Software Sustainability Institute — Research Software Maintenance Fund (RSMF)  
Project Start Date: 1 February 2026  
Project End Date: 31 January 2027  
Document owner: Maria J. Martin (Project Lead)  
Version: v1  
Last updated: 2026-02-26

## 1. Purpose

The ProtVista Advisory Board provides strategic, external input to support the sustainability, usability, and community adoption goals of the SSI RSMF-funded ProtVista work.

The Board exists to:

- Advise on priorities and sequencing of work (technical, documentation, and community).
- Provide critical feedback on the direction of the project and its outputs.
- Help ensure plans are realistic and aligned with user and stakeholder needs.
- Advise on strategies for reaching and onboarding new users beyond existing established networks.
- Strengthen connections to relevant user communities and partners.

## 2. Status and decision-making

The Advisory Board is advisory. It does not have formal decision-making authority over the codebase, staffing, budgets, or delivery.

Final decisions remain with the ProtVista maintainers and the Project Lead, taking Board input into account.

## 3. Scope

### In scope (examples)

- Advising on project priorities and major trade-offs (e.g., API/schema direction, configurability, performance work).
- Reviewing and providing feedback on key draft documents (e.g., the draft three-year roadmap and sustainability plan) at an appropriate level.
- Providing feedback on community engagement plans (e.g., webinar/hackathon/office hours approach) to help broaden reach.
- Identifying major risks to adoption and suggesting mitigations.

### Out of scope

- Day-to-day project management or delivery.
- Approving or rejecting pull requests or releases.
- Handling individual support requests or acting as moderators for GitHub spaces (unless separately agreed).

## 4. Membership

### Composition

To ensure diverse perspectives, the Board will include representatives from key stakeholder communities relevant to ProtVista.

The Board is expected to consist of 3 members.

The intended perspectives include (where possible):

- A representative from a major user community (e.g., Open Targets).
- A member of the UniProt Consortium leadership (for database alignment).
- A Research Software Engineer (RSE) with expertise in open-source sustainability.
- An industry user representative.

### Chair and secretariat

- Chair: Maria J. Martin (Project Lead)
- Secretariat: Daniel Rice (Lead Developer) or a nominated maintainer, responsible for agenda preparation, note-taking, and action tracking.

### Term

Members serve for the duration of the SSI RSMF project (Feb 2026–Jan 2027), unless they step down earlier.

## 5. Meetings and cadence

The Board will meet:

- At grant initiation
- At midpoint of the grant period
- Additional meetings as needed (e.g., to review roadmap/sustainability drafts)

Meetings are expected to be held virtually.

## 6. Quorum and participation

Quorum is 2 advisory members (excluding the Chair).

If a meeting cannot be scheduled, the project can request asynchronous input instead (e.g., written comments by email), and will treat two sets of written feedback as equivalent to quorum.

## 7. How advice is captured and acted on

To ensure advice is actionable and transparent:

- Agendas and key questions will be shared in advance where feasible.
- Notes will record key discussion points, recommendations, and any follow-up actions.
- For major recommendations, the project team will capture a short summary of: what we changed / what we did not change and why.

Where appropriate, high-level outcomes (excluding personal data) may be summarised in the repository (e.g., in `/governance/`) to support transparency.

## 8. Confidentiality and information handling

Board discussions may include early-stage plans or implementation details. Members should treat non-public information shared in meetings as confidential unless explicitly stated otherwise.

The project will avoid collecting or sharing unnecessary personal data in meeting notes.

## 9. Conflicts of interest

Members are expected to disclose any conflicts of interest relevant to the topics under discussion (e.g., commercial interests, competing tools, procurement decisions). If a conflict is declared, we will record that a conflict was declared and what action was taken (e.g., the member abstained from that item).

## 10. Code of Conduct

Board members and interactions fall under the project’s Code of Conduct. Any concerns about conduct should follow the reporting route described in that document.

## 11. Changes to this Terms of Reference

These Terms of Reference may be updated by the Project Lead as needed during the grant, with changes recorded in version history.

## 12. Funding

This work was supported by the Research Software Maintenance Fund, managed by the Software Sustainability Institute and funded by UKRI grant reference AH/Z000114/1.
