Excerpts from Nathaniel Smith's message of 2018-07-13 04:31:00 -0700:
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 :-).)
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
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.
I would be happy to contribute based on the experiences we've had with different leadership models in OpenStack.
Doug
-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.