Mailman 3 PyPA, Governance and Communication - PyPA-Committers

21 May 2018

      Kicking off a thread on the mailman:

So basically then, the immediate questions are:
...
So basically then, the immediate questions are:
A. Does all of the above sound reasonable to everyone involved here?
B. Do we want to just use a email chain with CCs on everyone as a temporary place for discussion for now until the above questions get answered, then move any subsequent stuff to whatever the answer is?
C. Are their additional people we should include? (I’ve CC’d everyone who is a maintainer of a PyPA project, since they’re the people this really effects, but if there’s some other important person to add then let’s do it).
D. If Yes to the above, who wants to be the BDFRN on the governance question?
I think the consensus we have so far is that A is Yes, for B we created this mailman list (though the CCs are fine too) and no one has particularly enthusiastically volunteered for D. Consolidating the "half volunteered" votes here:

1. Donald Stufft
2. Paul Moore
3. Thea Flowers

I have not included in this semi-summary Nick's proposal since it is more complicated and involves getting a grant. I personally think the grant thing is a useful idea but it's probably a good idea to have a BDFN independent of that who can be the final arbiter in this case. I don't know all the PyPA people as well as probably some of you, but Donald seems like a pretty natural choice to me for this.

...
Hey all.
You’re getting this email because you’re listed as a maintainer on one of the projects that fall under the PyPA umbrella and you’re not someone that I know is now in-active and thus no longer really interested in this sorts of discussions. I’ve tried to default to open here rather than closed, so if you don’t feel particularly like you care about this, or you’re sort of a one off contributor that don’t want to really be involved in the larger PyPA and you want to focus on just your one project, then feel free to ignore this email!
For everyone else, one of the things that I feel like came out of the packaging mini summit (and some subsequent discussion) is that we don’t really have very strong communication channels both between projects, and for projects to the world (and possibly even project to users?). This has generally been because PyPA has practically zero rules or infrastructure besides an org on Github and mandating the CoC, so we’ve never had anything that could function as that, and each individual project has been left otherwise entirely up to their own devices. This has lead to confusion, and a lack of a real good way to coordinate amongst ourselves.
So ultimately we have a few underlying questions to ask ourselves here:
1. Do we want to introduce more governance to the PyPA?
2. If we’re going to add more governance, how much do we want and what does that governance look like?
3. What sort of communication channels do we want to add, promote, or even retire?
So part of the problem with the fact we have no process, is that we have no process for deciding these questions. When I did the CoC thing, I just emailed all of the “member” projects, and asked if they had any opposition, nobody did so we made that a rule going forward. This is a little trickier because it has more room for having opinions about the specific shape the answers to each of those questions take and we’ve added more projects/people since then, so I’m going to assume that we’re unlikely to get a fully unanimous agreement on all of the details.
We’ve been using the PEP process for similar style questions (unlikely to get fully unanimous etc), but I don’t think that the actual PEP process itself is the right tool here, because in terms of how we structure the PyPA, we don’t really need or want to care about what other random people think about how we organize ourselves.
So here’s what I think we should do:
We pick someone to act as a Benevolent Dictator For Right Now (BDFRN), whose sole charter is to act as the final decision maker for the above questions. Once those questions have been answered, the BDFRN role is over, and whatever (if any) new process takes over— or if we elect not to have anything new, then we just end the discussion there and continue as we are.
The BDFRN will come up with a proposal first for answering the governance question, what, if any, governance we want to have and what shape that takes. This will effectively just be a “mini PEP” without any of the structure, just going through what that proposal is, how we make further decisions, etc etc. This will ideally be done with discussion amongst the people here (everyone I’ve CC’d is a maintainer of a PyPA project), and once the BDFRN has decided their proposal is ready, they’ll just call for a vote with some time limit 7 days?), and everyone involved here can +1, -1, +0, -0, or abstain (with no reply being abstain). Basically I see it working where if we get mostly +1/0 with no -1 and little to no -0 then the BDFRN will declare their proposal ratified, and we’ll switch to using whatever it is.
If we don’t get a rough consensus, they’ll amend the proposal or possibly ultimately decide to keep the status quo if there isn’t governance that we want and can agree on.
If that process does generate some level of governance with a decision making process, then I’d suggest we leave (3) from above as an open question for that new thing to decide. It’ll be a good first issue I think, and will give us a chance to test it, and possibly make tweaks to the system while it’s still new and fresh.
If that process does not generate any level of governance with a decision making process, then I’d suggest we re-use the same process from above, except for communication channels. This could have a different BDFRN, or the same it doesn’t really matter.
So basically then, the immediate questions are:
A. Does all of the above sound reasonable to everyone involved here?
B. Do we want to just use a email chain with CCs on everyone as a temporary place for discussion for now until the above questions get answered, then move any subsequent stuff to whatever the answer is?
C. Are their additional people we should include? (I’ve CC’d everyone who is a maintainer of a PyPA project, since they’re the people this really effects, but if there’s some other important person to add then let’s do it).
D. If Yes to the above, who wants to be the BDFRN on the governance question?
My answers are:
A: Yes
B: Yes
C: Maybe? I added everyone I could remember who were currently active maintainers, however there were a few folks (mentioned below) that I couldn’t locate email addresses for.
D: Don’t care, but am happy to do it if nobody else feels strongly about being it.
People I couldn’t locate email addresses for:
pipenv:
- https://github.com/erinxocon
- https://github.com/vphilippon
setuptools:
- https://github.com/idlesign https://github.com/idlesign
As an aside, there are way more people in this list then there was when we added the CoC, and I think that’s awesome :D
- Donald

PyPA, Governance and Communication

Paul G

Paul Moore

Thea Flowers

Ernest W. Durbin III

Dustin Ingram

Paul G

Paul Moore

Thea Flowers

Ian Stapleton Cordasco

Pradyun Gedam

Nicole Harris

Nick Coghlan

donald＠stufft.io

Dan Ryan

Sumana Harihareswara

Cooper Ry Lees

Ernest W. Durbin III

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participants (13)