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Merged
merged 13 commits into from
Oct 5, 2015
Merged

DEV: Governance document (draft) #6352

merged 13 commits into from
Oct 5, 2015

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njsmith
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@njsmith njsmith commented Sep 24, 2015

This probably shouldn't be merged yet, but since we seem to be starting to converge and there has been some feedback on specific text, let's get it up here where we can see it.

This is intentionally structured as multiple commits -- the first commit is a close translation of the version that was originally posted to the list, and then I'm making small commits on top of this, because it seems useful to record this history in a way that will let it be reviewed later. (And also, uh, now.)

The main differences from the version originally posted are:

Also, I stuck it into the dev docs -- if anyone has a suggestion for a better place let me know.

This is definitely *not* the final version -- it's the version
originally posted to the mailing list, reformatted as ReST. I'll make
further changes on top of this as further commits, in order to preserve
the historical record.
The NumFOCUS subcommittee and Institutional Partners are now listed in a
separate file, so delete them from here.

We will eventually want to clean up the list of initial members of the
steering council, but the details are still under discussion on the
mailing list, so I left that section alone for now.
I used pandoc to convert Markdown to ReST, and for some reason it marked
all the links with two underscores instead of the more conventional
single underscore. I'm not sure why.
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njsmith commented Sep 24, 2015

Also, as a suggestion: let's try to keep discussion of any semantic changes to the mailing list for now, so as not to confuse things.

Emeritus members
----------------

* Travis Oliphant - Project Founder / Emeritus Leader (served: 2001(??)-2012)
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@teoliphant: Can you check the years here?

The 2001 date I had originally was based on the beginning of NumPy's git
history -- but further research suggests that this actually runs back
into Numeric times, before the NumPy project was founded.

New 2005 date is based on Fernando's recollection of the fateful meeting
that led to NumPy's creation, and is consistent with Wikipedia's claim
that 2006 was the first release.

If this is wrong please let me know :-)
Now that this seems to be settled, we don't need this cluttering up the
main text. (For the record: the rule listed here is what we actually
used.)
Project Contributor who has produced contributions that are substantial
in quality and quantity, and sustained over at least one year. Potential
Council Members are nominated by existing Council members and voted upon
by the existing Council after asking if the potential Member is
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Hmm, the order could be reversed here. It might make sense for the vote to precede the invitation so as to avoid potential embarassment. The vote could be made part of the nomination process.

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I suspect the reason this got past the IPython folks was that in practice no-one is formally nominated unless there's already consensus that they'd be a good choice, so it wouldn't be an issue in practice. But, updated the text to clarify that these are two conditions that have to be met, rather than that one specifically has to follow the other.

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charris commented Oct 4, 2015

Looks almost ready ;) Thank Nathaniel.

…them

Original text seemed to imply that we would always ask the potential new
Council Member whether they were interested *before* we actually decided
whether to offer them a spot, which could create a sticky situation if
someone ever got voted down.

Rephrase to make clear that things do not have to occur in this order.
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njsmith commented Oct 5, 2015

Okay, I think I addressed everything!

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charris commented Oct 5, 2015

Nice rewording! Maybe one more. I suggest adding Allan Haldane to the initial Steering Council. He has already merged a PR, has a PR in the works, and is reviewing some of the other PRs.

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njsmith commented Oct 5, 2015

@charris: I've also been impressed by @ahaldane's contributions, but I'm somewhat uncomfortable about tweaking stuff like this at the last minute like this with just the two of us looking, and without having a clear picture of his contributions off the top of my head (has he been around a year already?). Would it be all right to put this in now as it is, and then consider that as the new council's first act?

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seberg commented Oct 5, 2015

Just to note, @rgommers will be back in a couple of days. I do not know whether he looked it closely before he left, but if he did not, maybe we can wait for him.

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charris commented Oct 5, 2015

@njsmith I'd just do it, it's as much diplomacy as anything else. @seberg Waiting for Ralf to take a look sounds reasonable, athough it may not be the first thing he wants to do when getting back ;) But a few days here or there aren't going to matter.

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njsmith commented Oct 5, 2015

@njsmith I'd just do it, it's as much diplomacy as anything else.

At this point I'm not willing to "just do it" on anything but wording tweaks without broader discussion. I'm sure we can trust @ahaldane to understand that this is simply because the goal of this process is to make these decisions more predictable and explicable to observers, and is not at all a judgement on their contributions :-).

Re: Ralf: Oh, good point, I hadn't realized that we were already that close to Ralf getting back. I'm pretty sure he left just before I finally finished and posted the draft (and ditto for the roadmap stuff), so I would assume he hasn't seen it.

My guess from talking to him before about governance issues is that his reaction will mostly be "oh thank goodness it's finally done". So I'd be comfortable with merging now, and if it turns out that he does have any concerns then it'll be easy enough to fix those even after it's merged. (The criterion for updates to the governance document is just consensus, same as any other change.) But if you all prefer to wait and get his sign-off explicitly then I'm fine with that too.

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charris commented Oct 5, 2015

Well, let's just get this in. However, there should probably be a note somewhere that states when it takes effect. Perhaps on merge?

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njsmith commented Oct 5, 2015

How about we merge it and then one of us sends an email to the list
announcing that as of it is now in effect?

On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Charles Harris notifications@github.com
wrote:

Well, let's just get this in. However, there should probably be a note
somewhere that states when it takes effect. Perhaps on merge?


Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#6352 (comment).

Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org

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ahaldane commented Oct 5, 2015

FWIW, I am still learning about the ideas for the future of numpy, so I probably wouldn't want to contribute much to that kind of discussion right now. I am sure if it is ever important it can be changed later.

Of course if I ended up on the council I wouldn't object. As Francois Arago once said when advised to turn down nomination to the National Academy, "I don't intend to make myself guilty of inconveniencing the Academy."

I suggest merging this without me on it, though I thank @charris for the consideration!

charris added a commit that referenced this pull request Oct 5, 2015
DEV: Governance document (draft)
@charris charris merged commit 39fc2a1 into numpy:master Oct 5, 2015
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charris commented Oct 5, 2015

OK, merged. Thanks Nathaniel. I'll send a note to the list.

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njsmith commented Oct 5, 2015

Woot! Thanks Chuck!

On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Charles Harris notifications@github.com
wrote:

OK, merged. Thanks Nathaniel. I'll send a note to the list.


Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#6352 (comment).

Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org

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charris commented Oct 5, 2015

We now need to set up some infrastructure. The two items that occur to me off the top are

  • Private mailing list for the Steering Committee.
  • Public site where the current membership of the Steering Commitee is listed, and probably a link to the Governance Document as well.

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njsmith commented Oct 5, 2015

The mailing list is a bit tricky b/c no-one seems to know who is actually running ou rmailing list infrastructure irght now :-) But see #6325 (comment)

As soon as the docs get rebuilt, we will have a public web site with the steering committee -- the .rst files that were just merged are built into the public docs. I'm not sure if we have an auto-updated version of the docs?

@rgommers
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rgommers commented Oct 8, 2015

Hi all, I'm back amongst the living. This looks excellent, thanks for putting in so much effort!

Regarding mailing lists:

  • the numpy list is administered by Enthought.
  • I don't see a reason for why the new steering committee list needs to be administered the same way as the numpy list, especially given the trouble we've had with the latter.
  • I'd go for a closed Google Groups list for the steering committee list, with all committee members having admin access to it.

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