Mailman 3 Comments on governance proposal (was: Notes from the numpy dev meeting at scipy 2015) - NumPy-Discussion

26 Aug 2015

      Hi,

Splitting this one off too because it's a rather different discussion,
although related.

On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 11:03 AM, Nathaniel Smith  wrote:

[snip]
...
Formalizing our governance/decision making
==========================================
This was a major focus of discussion. At a high level, the consensus
  was to steal IPython's governance document ("IPEP 29") and modify it
  to remove its use of a BDFL as a "backstop" to normal community
  consensus-based decision, and replace it with a new "backstop" based
  on Apache-project-style consensus voting amongst the core team.
Here's a plea to avoid a 'core' structure if at all possible.
Historically it seems to have some severe risks, and experienced
people have blamed this structure for the decline of various projects
including NetBSD and Xfree86, summaries here:

http://asterisk.dynevor.org/melting-core.html
http://asterisk.dynevor.org/xfree-forked.html

In short, the core structure seems to be characteristically associated
with a conservatism and lack of vision that causes the project to
stagnate.

There's also evidence from the NetBSD / OpenBSD split [1] and the
XFree86 / X.org split [2] - that the core structure can lead to bad
decisions being taken in private that no or few members of the core
group are prepared to defend.  I guess what is happening is that
distributed responsibility leads to poor accountability, and therefore
poor decisions.

So, I hope very much we can avoid that trap in our own governance.

Best,

Matthew

[1] http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/1994/12/23/0000.html
[2] http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/2003-March/001997.html

Comments on governance proposal (was: Notes from the numpy dev meeting at scipy 2015)

Matthew Brett

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