Guido,

Thank you for all you've done for Python. It is well deserved break.

I'm sad, but I like to see this as an opportunity to further improve Python and this community.

My first instinct is to suggest: instead of one successor, we will have several people as the new "leaders", perhaps a co-BDFL, or even 3-5 people as co-BDFLs/leaders.

This is based on my experience with organizing meetup and conference (although these are not comparable to leading the community like Python).

The benefit is to lessen the burden and responsibilities of one person, and they will have backups when they need to go on a break, vacation, take care of personal life.

Another thing that came to my mind is, who is actually able (have the time and energy) to take on this role? Most of us in open source are volunteering on limited free time available. I'm aware some of you have employer support, but most don't. Will this limit the candidacy to certain people just because they have the employer support?

What is the role of the successor(s)? Do we assume "whatever Guido did", or is this an opportunity to come up with a new process?

One useful resource is Vicky Brasseur's talk: Passing the Baton, Succession planning for your project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jhkm2PA_Gf8

The slides: https://ia800809.us.archive.org/2/items/pyconau2017-successionplanning/03-pyconau2017-successionplanning-with_notes.pdf

Some ideas from that talk:

1. identify critical roles (e.g. PEP decision making)

2. refactor large roles

3. mentor the new successor, shadow the previous leader

4. document all the things

This might be selfish request, but I hope you can still assume power until we have new successor(s).

Thanks.

Mariatta

On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 7:58 AM Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

Now that PEP 572 is done, I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.

I would like to remove myself entirely from the decision process. I'll still be there for a while as an ordinary core dev, and I'll still be available to mentor people -- possibly more available. But I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL, and you all will be on your own.

After all that's eventually going to happen regardless -- there's still that bus lurking around the corner, and I'm not getting younger... (I'll spare you the list of medical issues.)

I am not going to appoint a successor.

So what are you all going to do? Create a democracy? Anarchy? A dictatorship? A federation?

I'm not worried about the day to day decisions in the issue tracker or on GitHub. Very rarely I get asked for an opinion, and usually it's not actually important. So this can just be dealt with as it has always been.

The decisions that most matter are probably
- How are PEPs decided
- How are new core devs inducted

We may be able to write up processes for these things as PEPs (maybe those PEPs will form a kind of constitution). But here's the catch. I'm going to try and let you all (the current committers) figure it out for yourselves.

Note that there's still the CoC -- if you don't like that document your only option might be to leave this group voluntarily. Perhaps there are issues to decide like when should someone be kicked out (this could be banning people from python-dev or python-ideas too, since those are also covered by the CoC).

Finally. A reminder that the archives of this list are public (https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/) although membership is closed (limited to core devs).

I'll still be here, but I'm trying to let you all figure something out for yourselves. I'm tired, and need a very long break.

--
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

_______________________________________________
python-committers mailing list
python-committers@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/