Hey Chris (limiting to NumPy only),
I've had some great conversations with Nathaniel in the past few days and I'm glad he posted his thoughts so that there is no confusion about governance or what I was implying.
With respect to governance, I'm very supportive of what everyone is doing in organizing a governance document and approach and appreciate the effort of Nathaniel and others to move this forward. Nothing I said was meant to imply differently. I'm sorry if it made anyone nervous.
I'm a very enthusiastic person when I get an idea of what to do. I like to see things implemented. In this case, it also turns out that in terms of overall architecture, my ideas are actually very similar to Nathaniel's ideas. That's a good sign. We have different tactical approaches as to how to move forward, but I think it's a good thing to note that we see a very similar path forward. Nothing will be done in NumPy itself except via pull-request and review.
My approach for the ideas I'm pursuing will be to organize people around two new prototype packages I'm calling memtype and gufunc. The purpose of these is to allow playing with the design and ideas quickly before looking at how to put them into NumPy itself --- there will also be some training involved in getting people up to speed. There was a long discussion today at this BIDS data-structures for data-science summit part of which talked about how to improve NumPy's dtype system. I would love to these independent objects evolve into independent packages that could even go into Python standard library. Not everyone agrees that is the best idea, but regardless of whether this happens or not, the intent is to do work that could go into NumPy now.
I look forward to the activity.
-Travis