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DEV: Governance document (draft) #6352
Conversation
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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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 | ||
| ---------------- | ||
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| * Travis Oliphant - Project Founder / Emeritus Leader (served: 2001(??)-2012) |
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.)
In preparation for merging.
| 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 |
charris
Oct 4, 2015
Member
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.
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.
njsmith
Oct 5, 2015
Author
Member
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.
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.
| by the existing Council after asking if the potential Member is | ||
| interested and willing to serve in that capacity. The Council will be | ||
| initially formed from the set of existing Core Developers who, as of | ||
| late 2015, have been significantly active over the last year. |
charris
Oct 4, 2015
Member
Significantly is too vague, I think. Original attempt was commit bit, second was committed a merge (?), which both had the advantage of being public and concrete.
Significantly is too vague, I think. Original attempt was commit bit, second was committed a merge (?), which both had the advantage of being public and concrete.
charris
Oct 4, 2015
Member
We have to be able to say who will be on the council, and for subjective qualities we would need to set up a nominating committee, and recurse forever.
We have to be able to say who will be on the council, and for subjective qualities we would need to set up a nominating committee, and recurse forever.
charris
Oct 4, 2015
Member
OK, I see that names have been named below, which is somewhat different. Should at least be referenced here.
OK, I see that names have been named below, which is somewhat different. Should at least be referenced here.
njsmith
Oct 5, 2015
Author
Member
Added links to the governance document ("the current steering council membership is here", "the current numfocus subcommittee is here", "the current institutional partners are listed here").
I don't think we need to maintain a permanent record here of all the details of how we bootstrapped the initial council, because it isn't relevant going forward, and if anyone is ever curious about the details they can always be found in the mailing list archives or in git history: njsmith@29b09f8
Added links to the governance document ("the current steering council membership is here", "the current numfocus subcommittee is here", "the current institutional partners are listed here").
I don't think we need to maintain a permanent record here of all the details of how we bootstrapped the initial council, because it isn't relevant going forward, and if anyone is ever curious about the details they can always be found in the mailing list archives or in git history: njsmith@29b09f8
| Private communications of the Council | ||
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | ||
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| Unless specifically required, all Council discussions and activities |
charris
Oct 4, 2015
Member
?. 'Unless specifically required' doesn't fit here. Maybe 'Unless privacy is required'
?. 'Unless specifically required' doesn't fit here. Maybe 'Unless privacy is required'
njsmith
Oct 5, 2015
Author
Member
Made it "to the maximum extent possible", which I think works? Notice that the next sentence gives more details on how and when private conversation happens.
Made it "to the maximum extent possible", which I think works? Notice that the next sentence gives more details on how and when private conversation happens.
| approve the Partnership. | ||
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| If an existing Institutional Partner no longer has a contributing | ||
| employee, they will be given a 1 year grace period for remaining |
charris
Oct 4, 2015
Member
This is unclear. I think what we are aiming for here is that employees come an go and as long as the gap between employees does not exceed a year, it is OK. One way to say that is that is that the Institutional Partnership will lapse after a period of one year with no active employee.
This is unclear. I think what we are aiming for here is that employees come an go and as long as the gap between employees does not exceed a year, it is OK. One way to say that is that is that the Institutional Partnership will lapse after a period of one year with no active employee.
njsmith
Oct 5, 2015
Author
Member
Yes, that's my interpretation of what we want too.
Tried to rewrite to be more clear -- see what you think.
Yes, that's my interpretation of what we want too.
Tried to rewrite to be more clear -- see what you think.
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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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Okay, I think I addressed everything! |
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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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@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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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. |
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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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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How about we merge it and then one of us sends an email to the list On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Charles Harris notifications@github.com
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org |
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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! |
DEV: Governance document (draft)
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OK, merged. Thanks Nathaniel. I'll send a note to the list. |
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Woot! Thanks Chuck! On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Charles Harris notifications@github.com
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org |
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We now need to set up some infrastructure. The two items that occur to me off the top are
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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? |
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Hi all, I'm back amongst the living. This looks excellent, thanks for putting in so much effort! Regarding mailing lists:
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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.