On Fri, 13 Jul 2018 at 04:31 Nathaniel Smith njs@pobox.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 6:35 PM, Łukasz Langa lukasz@langa.pl wrote:
I'm +1 to an Informational PEP around the state of the art in project governance.
I think this is a great idea. There's a lot of experience out there on different governance models, but of course any given project only uses one of them, so knowledge about what works and what doesn't is pretty fragmented across the F/OSS community. And this is a really important decision for us and our users, so we should do due diligence. For example, we should think this through at least as carefully as we thought through Github vs. Gitlab :-). A PEP is a good format to start doing that.
I volunteer to co-author such a PEP. But I'm not up to doing it on my own. So... who else wants to be a co-author? (I'm not going to pressure anyone, but Brett, Mariatta, and Carol, please know that your names were the first ones that jumped to my mind when thinking about this :-).)
Thanks for thinking of me, but I actually already have a governance model that I want to propose so I don't think I could be viewed as impartial when gathering details on other approaches.
What I'm thinking:
While this might eventually produce some recommendations, the immediate goal would just be to collect together different options and ideas and point out their trade-offs. I'm guessing most core devs aren't interested in becoming experts on open-source governance, so the goal here would be to help the broader community get up to speed and have a more informed discussion [1].
As per the general PEP philosophy, I think this is best done by having some amount of general discussion on python-dev/python-committers, plus a small group of coauthors (say 2-4 people) who take responsibility for filtering ideas and organizing them in a coherent document.
Places where we'll want to look for ideas:
- The thread already happening on python-committers
- Whatever books / articles / blog posts / etc. we can find (e.g. I know Karl Fogel's Producing OSS book has some good discussion)
- Other major projects in a similar position to CPython (e.g., node.js, Rust) -- what do they do, and what parts are they happy/not-happy about?
- Large Python projects (e.g. Django) -- likewise
So are you thinking an informational PEP that does a general survey of other projects and how they handle things? If so then I think that would be interesting to have even for other projects looking for this kind of information.
My suspicion is when we all decide it's time to make a decision that we will have a call for PEPs on governance models and then we will choose from those. So in that situation I would view this initial PEP as information gathering for those that want an idea of what preexisting approaches there are before working towards a concrete proposal. That sounds about right?
If you have suggestions for particularly interesting projects or excellent writing on the topic, then this thread would be a good place to mention them.
Someone privately suggested Kafka to me, but I think that's partially because Kafka is apparently about to propose a release and the person follows its development.
-Brett
-n
[1] The NumPy project has put a lot of energy into working through governance issues over the last few years, and one thing that definitely helped was coming up with some "assigned reading" ahead of the main sprint where we talked about this. NumPy's problems are/were pretty different from CPython's, but I'm imagining this PEP as filling a similar role.
-- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
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