Add Distinguished Contributors #84
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Suggestion; once of twice a year have a google form with "nominate folks" open to everyone.
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@Carreau The current SC will be the inaugural set of Distinguished Contributors, yes. But this group is not supposed to receive a prize; it won't be left to each individual to waive it, the prize is intended only going forward. |
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Yes sorry that's what I meant by waive. Just want to make sure that this is stated. |
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@tgeorgeux thanks for opening the PR, and thanks to the other folks (in particular @afshin) who have been working on this with @fperez and I. Glad to see us moving this forward. |
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This pull request has been mentioned on Jupyter Community Forum. There might be relevant details there: https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/governance-office-hours-meeting-minutes/1480/107 |
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I am happy to be a member of a working group to select the first cohort of distinguished contributors. Having others from different parts of the project and ecosystem would be very helpful because we all know different people who ought to be included. |
I will be happy as well to serve in this working group. |
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I'm happy to serve on the working group. |
distinguished_contributors.md
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| ### Selecting Distinguished Contributors Members | ||
| Distinguished Contributors are added to this body on an annual basis, through a voting process carried out by the pre-existing body of Distinguished Contributors. The number of candidates chosen each year will be limited to five new members. Nominations for election can be submitted by any Distinguished Contributor to be reviewed by a committee of peer reviewers chosen from the Distinguished Contributors. This committee is responsible for managing the private voting process and reviewing nominees to ensure that they meet the minimum criteria for Distinguished Contributor status. After nominees are finalized, the Distinguished Contributors will vote in a ranked preference process. | ||
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| Each newly inducted member will be awarded a nominal purse of up to $500 per awardee, subject to budgetary constraints, in recognition for service to the community. |
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What exactly does "nominal purse" mean? Presumably we shouldn't fix a single amount (if we do lower, then it looks bad, and over time presumably inflation makes $500 seem less and less anyway?). To me, the actual dollar amount seems to be an implementation detail, and dependent on funding.
| Each newly inducted member will be awarded a nominal purse of up to $500 per awardee, subject to budgetary constraints, in recognition for service to the community. | |
| Each newly inducted member will be awarded a nominal purse, subject to budgetary constraints, in recognition for service to the community. |
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This is a point that came up in conversation and we went back and forth on it. I think I agree with your interpretation, Jason. If I recall correctly, the counterpoint was that it shouldn't need to be a conversation every single year. But I may be misremembering other nuances. But perhaps someone else remembers other reasons we put this in here.
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Fair enough, but it does say "up to", so it already is a conversation each year. My guess is that some nominal amount will be set initially, and then tradition will carry it on for quite a while. But tradition is easier to update than encoded tradition (governance docs).
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In fact, you could take out the whole sentence of the purse, and leave even the idea of a prize to tradition.
Co-authored-by: Jason Grout <jasongrout@users.noreply.github.com>
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I'd like to be on the working group as well |
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I would like to be part of the working group. Thanks. Can we make this a semi-annual process to approve new members? I can think of 20 people right off the top of my head that would be deserving and there are certainly more than that given the time that has passed and the notebook's huge growth. |
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Hi @tgeorgeux thanks! Github username is @sharanf :-) |
Hi Carol! I think we can be flexible on what the initial cohort size should be because we have, as you say, such a backlog. But going forward, after the initial bootstrapping, do you think five people a year is too few? Here are some of the thoughts that went into this:
So suppose we added 20 people this year, or even more, do you think in the following years five recipients will be too few? Perhaps the number that needs to change is not the annual limit but the initial bootstrap number. Should it be larger than 20? |
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The other place that limiting the annual number came into play was in our
desire to be able to use ranked choice voting (rather than simple yes/no on
each candidate).
…On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 5:54 AM Afshin Taylor Darian < ***@***.***> wrote:
Can we make this a semi-annual process to approve new members? I can think
of 20 people right off the top of my head that would be deserving and there
are certainly more than that given the time that has passed and the
notebook's huge growth.
Hi Carol! I think we can be flexible on what the initial cohort size
should be because we have, as you say, such a backlog. But going forward,
after the initial bootstrapping, do you think five people a year is too
few? Here are some of the thoughts that went into this:
- We want scarcity here to make sure the recognition being awarded is
valuable to the recipient -- it should be compelling enough for someone who
is already established in her career to still want it on her CV.
- This is a direct analogue to how we used to ask people to join the
Steering Council in recognition of their contributions and the bar is meant
to be roughly at that level.
- We thought an annual tradition of announcing this year's recipients
at JupyterCon would create a nice cadence, starting this October.
So suppose we added 20 people this year, or even more, do you think in the
following years five recipients will be too few? Perhaps the number that
needs to change is not the annual limit but the initial bootstrap number.
Should it be larger than 20?
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I think five per year is too low, it probably means less than one person per "subproject". Maybe not all sub project produce a person every year but it would also mean wanting to pick two people who worked together on something becomes virtually impossible unless it was across two sub projects. I think a goal should be to achieve "fairness" across the ecosystem, hence the thought experiment of splitting across subprojects. I think the "prestige" will not come from scarcity but from the people who are elected. What they did in the past, what they do in the future, do they remain active on the project, do they go on to do other good things in the world and generally how they conduct themselves. A hard limit feels like scientific journals who think their "prestige" or "importance" increases because they have a high rejection factor. I would formulate it as "For the current community size we expect to elect around N people each year." and give some explicit advice on how to determine if someone should be added or not. Not thinking "checklist style" but more in the direction of a wordy explanation of the goals of the award, what would dilute it, what would increase its prestige. Maybe also require a short written citation for each new member which serves as a public recognition of their work and also gives future generations an idea of what the bar is. ("equivalent to SC" isn't very good as, for example, I have no idea what that means. From the outside it seems like awarding SC membership is a somewhat murky process which isn't necessarily a bad thing but does mean it isn't a good explanation of what yard stick to use.) |
It likely does mean that, yes.
But this conclusion does not follow as a consequence. This exact scenario actually seems pretty likely to me. I don't think anything in either the spirit of this proposal or the letter of it prevents an outcome where two people who worked on one sub-project are recognized together.
This is part of how we envision the annual award ceremony at JupyterCon.
The process is not murky. Ranked choice voting among any of the Distinguished Contributors who choose to vote seems a rather clear process. |
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Hi @afshin, Thanks for the response. I do think 5 people a year is too low. Given how large the project is, the number should be higher (10 target, not to exceed 15 annually). Ten would be similar to Python Fellows with the number of folks ranging from 2-5 per quarter. While we could debate the merits of voting methods (let's not - 😉), I'm concerned that the combination of voting and 5 people almost guarantees a "manel" of distinguished contributors where the beginning population will continue to reinforce the majority. Perhaps adding a regional contributors recognition (representation from all continents except Antarctica - 3 people) with up to say 20 per year (without governance voting rights) would offer another way to both recognize people and also strengthen the global growth of Jupyter. |
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I didn't mean that the mechanics (ranked list of preference) are murky. What is unclear (to me) is how individual voters should rank the people. In the absence of some kind of guidance that is available for both for rankers and rankees I think the process is "murky" because it is unclear what you should use to rank people and what you should do to get a high ranking. It isn't meant to make it a game where you can score points but rather to try and bring some objectiveness/guidance into a process that is open to abuse (hello peerages in the UK) as well as combat the self-similarness problem that Carol mentioned. Similar to how having some guidance from a conference organiser helps those tasked with (uniformly) scoring lots of talk proposals. |
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This isn't an abstract problem. We have a set of projects and we have a set of contributors to those projects. We collectively know that a subset of those contributors have been around a long time and deserve to be recognized. We're not just picking names from the entire huge community of users to award recognition to, we're picking from the people we know who are contributing to our sub-projects. I think if you consider this an abstract problem it becomes difficult. If instead you think about the order of magnitude (fewer than a few hundred people are contributors, a subset of whom are longtime contributors) this strikes me as a simpler problem.
I think designing a simple prompt in the ballot should solve this issue and ought to be the purview of the working group. My intuition is that it'll read something like: "If you choose to vote pick the top ten (or whatever x we finally settle on) or fewer people whose contributions to Jupyter merit recognition in the broader community." And presumably each contributor will have their accompanying nomination profile accessible to the voters. But these details can and should be the purview of the working group from the Distinguished Contributors body to decide on and not enshrined as core project governance. The Distinguished Contributors body is not intended to be the group who governs Jupyter. The primary purpose of this is to alleviate the deficit we have: we used to reward longtime contributors with membership in the Steering Council. That model worked fine for a while and then it stopped scaling. This is only meant to solve that aspect of governance. Actual governing of the project is to be addressed in the Board of Directors and the Software Steering Council pull requests that are forthcoming.
I don't have a strong intuition about the numbers here. Python has a larger number of contributors than Jupyter. I don't know exactly how much bigger it is, but it is larger enough that I would imagine our annual haul of awardees should be smaller. But if five is too few, perhaps ten is more appropriate. I wonder what others think.
I don't think a geographic consideration is apt here because we're not simply looking for people who do great things with Jupyter, we're looking for longtime, active contributors to Jupyter, whomever they are and wherever they are. I do think one of the missions we undertake with the new governance model ought to be bringing in contributors from the whole globe so that they end up becoming Distinguished Contributors but I don't think the Distinguished Contributors body should play an active role in formal governance. It is explicitly intended to merely be an award and not one of the arms of decision-making. |
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Another thing that we did talk about in writing the doc: 5 is an initial
guess, if we find it is too low, we can change it later - even in the
middle of a cycle if we get a larger than number of candidates.
…On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 12:38 PM Afshin Taylor Darian < ***@***.***> wrote:
This isn't an abstract problem. We have a set of projects and we have a
set of contributors to those projects. We collectively know that a subset
of those contributors have been around a long time and deserve to be
recognized. We're not just picking names from the entire huge community of
users to award recognition to, we're picking from the people we *know*
who are contributing to our sub-projects.
I think if you consider this an abstract problem it becomes difficult. If
instead you think about the order of magnitude (fewer than a few hundred
people are contributors, a subset of whom are longtime contributors) this
strikes me as a simpler problem.
What is unclear (to me) is how individual voters should rank the people.
In the absence of some kind of guidance that is available for both for
rankers and rankees I think the process is "murky" because it is unclear
what you should use to rank people and what you should do to get a high
ranking.
I think designing a simple prompt in the ballot should solve this issue
and ought to be the purview of the working group. My intuition is that
it'll read something like: "If you choose to vote pick the top ten (or
whatever *x* we finally settle on) or fewer people whose contributions to
Jupyter merit recognition in the broader community." And presumably each
contributor will have their accompanying nomination profile accessible to
the voters. But these details can and should be the purview of the working
group from the Distinguished Contributors body to decide on and not
enshrined as core project governance.
The Distinguished Contributors body is not intended to be the group who
*governs* Jupyter. The primary purpose of this is to alleviate the
deficit we have: we used to reward longtime contributors with membership in
the Steering Council. That model worked fine for a while and then it
stopped scaling. This is only meant to solve that aspect of governance.
*Actual* governing of the project is to be addressed in the Board of
Directors and the Software Steering Council pull requests that are
forthcoming.
I do think 5 people a year is too low. Given how large the project is, the
number should be higher (10 target, not to exceed 15 annually). Ten would
be similar to Python Fellows with the number of folks ranging from 2-5 per
quarter.
I don't have a strong intuition about the numbers here. Python has a
larger number of contributors than Jupyter. I don't know exactly how much
bigger it is, but it is larger enough that I would imagine our annual haul
of awardees should be smaller. But if five is too few, perhaps ten is more
appropriate. I wonder what others think.
Perhaps adding a regional contributors recognition (representation from
all continents except Antarctica - 3 people) with up to say 20 per year
(without governance voting rights) would offer another way to both
recognize people and also strengthen the global growth of Jupyter.
I don't think a geographic consideration is apt here because we're not
simply looking for people who do great things *with* Jupyter, we're
looking for longtime, active contributors *to* Jupyter, whomever they are
and wherever they are. I do think one of the missions we undertake with the
new governance model ought to be bringing in contributors from the whole
globe so that they end up becoming Distinguished Contributors but I don't
think the Distinguished Contributors body should play an active role in
formal governance. It is explicitly intended to merely be an award and not
one of the arms of decision-making.
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distinguished_contributors.md
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| ## Purpose | ||
| This document describes the Distinguished Contributors body of the Jupyter Governance Model. Membership in the Distinguished Contributors is meant to recognize the work of community members that have gone above-and-beyond in their work on the project. It is not meant as a means of conveying power or responsibility. A public record of each Distinguished Contributor’s current biography and achievements will be maintained by the members themselves and will be displayed on the Jupyter website. | ||
| ## Rights of Distinguished Contributors | ||
| Distinguished Contributors have the right to elect new Distinguished Contributors. They also have the right to participate in other occasional votes specified by the broader Jupyter Governance Model. |
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@afshin This is specifically where I'm finding Distinguished Contributors unclear. You mentioned in the response that it's not a governance body but as written this is a bit confusing.
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That's a really good point!
This was a late addition and the idea behind it was that occasionally the Board of Directors and the Software Steering Council might jointly want to subject something to a project-wide vote. We didn't know what that might be and we didn't have a specific example in mind (although maybe @fperez did, I believe he raised the idea originally). But this sentence was meant to indicate that the Distinguished Contributors are not really part of the governance though they may on occasion be solicited for a vote.
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I would suggest removing as the governing body would always have the right to ask Distinguished Contributors to vote on any governance issues that the governing body requests.
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Leaving the sentence about electing new Distinguished Contributors.
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I agree with you. I'd like to ask Fernando what scenario he was considering in tomorrow's call, but I think removing it would be clarifying.
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I think part of this is also related to managing the expectations of the people that become Distinguished Contributors. Is being a Distinguished Contributor simply an award of recognition that they receive or are they expected to participate and do something once they have achieved that recognition? Having access to this group of people could be a good way to get feedback that could inform the Board of Directors and Software Steering Council so it would be good to indicate this expectation somewhere so it is clear what could be asked of Distinguished Contributors.
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Good point @sharanf. Perhaps it is better to move away from governance terms and have something more along the lines:
We recognize the knowledge and experience that the Distinguished Contributor brings to the project. From time to time, the Board of Directors and Software Steering Council may poll the group of Distinguished Contributors for their insights.
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My concern is if you leave it in governance terms, it becomes a governing body. Therefore, adding to the confusion when rolling out the new governance.
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Carol, we struggled to find the right language. For the most part, this is
not meant to be a governing body, but we would like the body to own the
process/election of new members. In the existing language we used the term
"right" to avoid the connotations of "responsibilities" - but we may still
need to iterate on it.
…On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 3:41 PM Carol Willing ***@***.***> wrote:
***@***.**** commented on this pull request.
------------------------------
In distinguished_contributors.md
<#84 (comment)>:
> @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+# Jupyter Distinguished Contributors
+## Purpose
+This document describes the Distinguished Contributors body of the Jupyter Governance Model. Membership in the Distinguished Contributors is meant to recognize the work of community members that have gone above-and-beyond in their work on the project. It is not meant as a means of conveying power or responsibility. A public record of each Distinguished Contributor’s current biography and achievements will be maintained by the members themselves and will be displayed on the Jupyter website.
+## Rights of Distinguished Contributors
+Distinguished Contributors have the right to elect new Distinguished Contributors. They also have the right to participate in other occasional votes specified by the broader Jupyter Governance Model.
@afshin <https://github.com/afshin> This is specifically where I'm
finding Distinguished Contributors unclear. You mentioned in the response
that it's not a governance body but as written this is a bit confusing.
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A record of the contribution would be relevant to both of the above. It would be nice to have a certificate or something for the home office with a succinct statement "For contributions to _ _ _ " |
Added Carol's changes to change the text from feeling 'too governancy'.
Removed "up to" from nominal purse. Added "to Jupyter itself" to. Adjusted annual Distinguished Contributors to "to 10".
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We continued the discussion in the call today. I've made updates to reflect the discussion threads above. I'd like to pull this draft first thing Friday morning. If there's something that we need block on please get your comments on by Thursday. |
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Alright, I'm pulling this out of Draft, I sincerely hope we can get this rolling in time for JupyterCon this year! I'll add the checkboxes for votes at the top of the original post. |
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I just voted to approve this, and thank you everyone who worked on this. And also thanks in advance to the folks who've stepped up to serve on the working group to address figuring out the missing mechanism for selecting new distinguished contributors. I am happy to help with this as well, if necessary. @afshin wrote:
I think it would be better if the working group sets up the process of nominating and voting (mechanics and medium), rather than having a working group selecting the additional members outright. This way the inaugural distinguished contributors (the steering council) can participate in the selection of these new distinguished contributors "through a voting process carried out by the pre-existing body of Distinguished Contributors" (per wording in the PR). |
I completely agree with you. The way I said that above was too broad an elision, I intended to say the working group puts together the process, the vote, etc. |
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We have passed the vote threshold to merge this pull request. I propose we leave it open a little while longer because it would send a strong signal to the community the broader our consensus is. |
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I was asked to comment on this. I imagine that it has probably been discussed in great detail already while I wasn't paying attention, so feel free to move forwards without answering my comments if I'm just looping back to discussions that have already played out. But I was asked for input, so I don't want to just tick yes with no other comment.
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Thanks for the input @takluyver! Given that at this point formal discussion had wrapped up, it would be great if you could convey your official stance by voting. But obviously we can continue refining and clarifying things, especially as a working group is forming up that will necessarily have to pin down the specifics of the process. To answer a few points (I'm tight on time and will need to revisit the others later):
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🎉 |
afshin
added
decision made
Votes
@afshin
@blink1073
@Carreau
@damianavila
@ellisonbg
@fperez
@ivanov
@jasongrout
@jhamrick
@minrk
@mpacer
@parente
@rgbkrk
@Ruv7
@SylvainCorlay
@takluyver
@willingc
Background
The Governance Refactor team is ready to debut the document for Distinguished Contributors. Special thanks to: @ellisonbg @lresende @afshin @choldgraf @fperez, @sharanf, @LayneSadler
A brief summary of the change.
We've added a scalable way to recognize Jupyter Contributors who have been key to the growth and success of the ecosystem without over-bloating our governance mechanisms.
What is the reason for this change?
We don't currently have a way to recognize people publicly without adding them to the steering council.
Alternatives to making this change and other considerations.
The easiest alternative to this is to continue to add members to the steering council Ad Infinitum. Alternatively, we could also not recognize contributors that don't take part in the governance team.
Contents of the PR
Jupyter Distinguished Contributors
Purpose
This document describes the Distinguished Contributors body of the Jupyter Governance Model. Membership in the Distinguished Contributors is meant to recognize the work of community members that have gone above-and-beyond in their work on the project. It is not meant as a means of conveying power or responsibility. A public record of each Distinguished Contributor’s current biography and achievements will be maintained by the members themselves and will be displayed on the Jupyter website.
Rights of Distinguished Contributors
Distinguished Contributors have the right to elect new Distinguished Contributors. They also have the right to participate in other occasional votes specified by the broader Jupyter Governance Model.
Distinguished Contributor membership
Criteria for Nominating New Distinguished Contributors
To be considered for nomination as a Distinguished Contributor a Project Contributor must have produced contributions that are substantial in quality and quantity and sustained over at least two years. When considering potential Members, the existing Distinguished Contributors will look at nominees with a comprehensive view of their contributions. This will include but is not limited to code, code review, infrastructure work, mailing list and chat participation, community help/building, education and outreach, fundraising, branding, marketing, inclusion and diversity, UX design and research, etc. We are deliberately not setting arbitrary quantitative metrics (like “100 commits in this repo”) to avoid encouraging behavior that plays to the metrics rather than the project’s overall well-being.
Term length
Membership in the Distinguished Contributors' body is a lifetime appointment.
Selecting Distinguished Contributors Members
Distinguished Contributors are added to this body on an annual basis, through a voting process carried out by the pre-existing body of Distinguished Contributors. The number of candidates chosen each year will be limited to five new members. Nominations for election can be submitted by any Distinguished Contributor to be reviewed by a committee of peer reviewers chosen from the Distinguished Contributors. This committee is responsible for managing the private voting process and reviewing nominees to ensure that they meet the minimum criteria for Distinguished Contributor status. After nominees are finalized, the Distinguished Contributors will vote in a ranked preference process.
Each newly inducted member will be awarded a nominal purse of up to $500 per awardee, subject to budgetary constraints, in recognition for service to the community.
Bootstrapping the Distinguished Contributors
The inaugural members of the Distinguished Contributors will be the members of the original Jupyter Steering Council. There will be no monetary award for these bootstrap year inductions. Within the first 3 months of its existence, the DCs will run a special election to address the backlog of potential DCs. This special election will be limited to 20 additional members.
Questions we need to address
The process ❗
The process for changing the governance pages is as follows:
The discussion phase is meant to gather input and multiple perspectives from the community.
Make sure that the community has had an opportunity to weigh in on
the change before calling a vote. A good rule of thumb is to ask several steering council
members if they believe that it is time for a vote and to let at least one person review
the pull request for structural quality and typos.