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Organizing an informational PEP on project governance options (was Re: Transfer of power)

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Nathaniel Smith

13 Jul 2018 13 Jul '18

11:31 a.m.

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.

-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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Antoine Pitrou

13 Jul 13 Jul

1:13 p.m.

Le 13/07/2018 à 13:31, Nathaniel Smith a écrit :

...

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 :-).)

I don't know how much time I'll be able to devote to it, but feel free to enlist me.

...

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.

Perhaps Apache httpd? (or some other major Apache project, since I /think/ they share similar governance structures... I happen to work on Apache Arrow, which is young and a bit on the small side compared to Python, but can ask the project leaders for feedback)

Regards

Antoine.

...

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

-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.

Doug Hellmann

2:08 p.m.

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.

Brett Cannon

6:26 p.m.

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

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/

Barry Warsaw

14 Jul 14 Jul

12:15 a.m.

On Jul 13, 2018, at 04:31, Nathaniel Smith njs@pobox.com wrote:

...

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 :-).)

Count me in.

Procedurally, I think an informational PEP numbered in sequence is a good place for the “design” of our governance. Once we’ve settled on a plan, we would capture the operational procedures in a new process PEP (I propose PEP 2), which would be our working document moving forward. I think it’s pretty much a certainty that whatever we come up with initially will undergo changes as time goes on and we gain experience. PEP 2 would then be the living document for our language governance process.

-Barry

Carol Willing

12:28 a.m.

...

On Jul 13, 2018, at 5:15 PM, Barry Warsaw barry@python.org wrote:

On Jul 13, 2018, at 04:31, Nathaniel Smith njs@pobox.com wrote:

...
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 :-).)

Count me in.

Me too.

...

Procedurally, I think an informational PEP numbered in sequence is a good place for the “design” of our governance.

I've been debating all day how to respond to this informational PEP re: governance. While I think it's great to cull good practices from other communities, I'm not sure that Python really fits into any existing governance that other projects use. IMHO Python is one of the healthiest language/community in the open source world. There's a reason that the saying "I came for the language and stayed for the community" exists.

There's also a reason the Zen of Python has been so popular for so long. It works.

While this may be an unconventional idea, I would love to look at governance through the lens of these 2 universally held beliefs as we begin to "design" our goverance (Thank you Barry for phrasing so well).

...

Once we’ve settled on a plan, we would capture the operational procedures in a new process PEP (I propose PEP 2), which would be our working document moving forward. I think it’s pretty much a certainty that whatever we come up with initially will undergo changes as time goes on and we gain experience. PEP 2 would then be the living document for our language governance process.

Sounds great.

...

-Barry

Nathaniel Smith

2 Aug 2 Aug

3:17 a.m.

I'm sorry, I seem to have accidentally licked a cookie [1] here. I'm still keen to see this happen and to be a part of it, and have been trying to be find the spoons to take the lead on organizing, but it's been a few weeks now and that hasn't happened yet [2].

Does anyone else want to take the lead here? A number of people have expressed interest in helping or in making introductions to other communities, and I think the next step would be to organize some kind of kick off meeting to rough out an outline and start divvying up work.

-n

[1] http://communitymgt.wikia.com/wiki/Cookie_Licking [2] not to go into too many details, but basically I'm currently sick, unemployed, and broke, which isn't a crisis but sorting it out is sucking up a lot of energy.

On Jul 13, 2018 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.

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.

-n

-- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org

Mariatta Wijaya

8 Aug 8 Aug

5:02 p.m.

Hi Nathaniel,

I know you mentioned my name earlier, and thanks for thinking of me. But I'm really sorry, I just don't have the bandwidth to help out with this right now.

Not sure if you've made any progress yet. Since the intention is to collect information of the various governance models out there, I was thinking perhaps you can ask non core developers to help out with this effort. So that way you're not constrained by the limited number of core devs and their limited free time available.

What do you think?

Mariatta

On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:17 PM Nathaniel Smith njs@pobox.com wrote:

...

I'm sorry, I seem to have accidentally licked a cookie [1] here. I'm still keen to see this happen and to be a part of it, and have been trying to be find the spoons to take the lead on organizing, but it's been a few weeks now and that hasn't happened yet [2].

Does anyone else want to take the lead here? A number of people have expressed interest in helping or in making introductions to other communities, and I think the next step would be to organize some kind of kick off meeting to rough out an outline and start divvying up work.

-n

[1] http://communitymgt.wikia.com/wiki/Cookie_Licking [2] not to go into too many details, but basically I'm currently sick, unemployed, and broke, which isn't a crisis but sorting it out is sucking up a lot of energy.

On Jul 13, 2018 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 :-).)

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.

-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

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/

Antoine Pitrou

5:39 p.m.

New subject: Organizing an informational PEP on project governance options

Hi all,

I contacted Nathaniel and the people who had mentioned interest in private, so as not to lose momentum and try to move this forward. So far only Doug responded. If anyone else wants to participate, feel free to contact me / us (either on-list or in private).

I think we need at least 2 or 3 core developers on this, and of course we can also invite non-core developers.

Regards

Antoine.

Le 08/08/2018 à 19:02, Mariatta Wijaya a écrit :

...

Hi Nathaniel,

I know you mentioned my name earlier, and thanks for thinking of me. But I'm really sorry, I just don't have the bandwidth to help out with this right now.

Not sure if you've made any progress yet. Since the intention is to collect information of the various governance models out there, I was thinking perhaps you can ask non core developers to help out with this effort. So that way you're not constrained by the limited number of core devs and their limited free time available.

What do you think?

Mariatta

On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:17 PM Nathaniel Smith mailto:njs@pobox.com> wrote:
I'm sorry, I seem to have accidentally licked a cookie [1] here. I'm
still keen to see this happen and to be a part of it, and have been
trying to be find the spoons to take the lead on organizing, but
it's been a few weeks now and that hasn't happened yet [2].

Does anyone else want to take the lead here? A number of people have
expressed interest in helping or in making introductions to other
communities, and I think the next step would be to organize some
kind of kick off meeting to rough out an outline and start divvying
up work.

-n

[1] http://communitymgt.wikia.com/wiki/Cookie_Licking
[2] not to go into too many details, but basically I'm currently
sick, unemployed, and broke, which isn't a crisis but sorting it out
is sucking up a lot of energy.

Yury Selivanov

5:44 p.m.

New subject: Organizing an informational PEP on project governance options

Hi Antoine,

I'll try to find some time and help. I'm not sure how much time I can contribute exactly, but I at least can help with a review and maybe brainstorm. Count me in.

Yury On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 1:39 PM Antoine Pitrou antoine@python.org wrote:

...

Hi all,

I contacted Nathaniel and the people who had mentioned interest in private, so as not to lose momentum and try to move this forward. So far only Doug responded. If anyone else wants to participate, feel free to contact me / us (either on-list or in private).

I think we need at least 2 or 3 core developers on this, and of course we can also invite non-core developers.

Regards

Antoine.

Le 08/08/2018 à 19:02, Mariatta Wijaya a écrit :

...
Hi Nathaniel,

I know you mentioned my name earlier, and thanks for thinking of me. But I'm really sorry, I just don't have the bandwidth to help out with this right now.

Not sure if you've made any progress yet. Since the intention is to collect information of the various governance models out there, I was thinking perhaps you can ask non core developers to help out with this effort. So that way you're not constrained by the limited number of core devs and their limited free time available.

What do you think?

Mariatta

On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:17 PM Nathaniel Smith mailto:njs@pobox.com> wrote:
I'm sorry, I seem to have accidentally licked a cookie [1] here. I'm
still keen to see this happen and to be a part of it, and have been
trying to be find the spoons to take the lead on organizing, but
it's been a few weeks now and that hasn't happened yet [2].

Does anyone else want to take the lead here? A number of people have
expressed interest in helping or in making introductions to other
communities, and I think the next step would be to organize some
kind of kick off meeting to rough out an outline and start divvying
up work.

-n

[1] http://communitymgt.wikia.com/wiki/Cookie_Licking
[2] not to go into too many details, but basically I'm currently
sick, unemployed, and broke, which isn't a crisis but sorting it out
is sucking up a lot of energy.
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/

-- Yury

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Antoine Pitrou
Barry Warsaw
Brett Cannon
Carol Willing
Doug Hellmann
Mariatta Wijaya
Nathaniel Smith
Yury Selivanov

Organizing an informational PEP on project governance options (was Re: Transfer of power)

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