Hi, On Sun, Sep 4, 2016 at 1:07 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
Starting with the summary of my email of earlier today: I'd like to push on with agreeing on a governance model and document. We had some discussions and a hangout on that last year [1]. In the hangout we decided to give people some time to read up on provided info on how this worked in other projects, the Karl Fogel book, etc. I was supposed to organize a follow-up, but failed to do so until now. I will send a separate email about this shortly.
We're now at a point where most other major projects in the scientific Python ecosystem have a formal governance model. Many are modeled after the Jupyter one [2], which defines a BDFL, a steering council and contributors, and a voting system to make decisions (simplified, there's much more - the whole document is worth reading). NumPy chose another model, with a steering council and consensus-based decision making [3]. From the outside, the Jupyter model seems to be working for them. The NumPy model hasn't been exercised too much yet, but should work well too. There are variations on those two models in use as well (like the Jupyter model minus the BDFL).
An email discussion on this topic without a concrete proposal or summary document is likely to go on for a long time and may not converge easily. A video conference is also tricky, with dates/timezones and discussion often going off on tangents. So I have the following proposal:
- We start by drafting an extended summary of the various models and getting a sense of which model the core team prefers. - We then work out that model, and bring it back to this list for discussion/finetuning/acceptance. - "We" here is the group of people who indicate, on this list or to me off-list, that they want to participate by the end of this week.
I'm happy to help. I have some time this coming week. I know that Stefan vdW is thinking hard about these issues at the moment for scikit-image, so we may be able to collaborate with scikit-image on some of these discussions. The Jupyter (BDFL) model got picked up by at Pandas [1], and MPL [2]. The numpy model is designed for the situation where was not an obvious candidate to be project leader. So, I strongly suspect that our choice of model will come down to whether we can agree on a project leader, or agree on a way to chose one. The obvious candidates would I guess be in this list: git shortlog -ns --since "5 years ago" | head -5 1789 Pauli Virtanen 1528 Ralf Gommers 770 Evgeni Burovski 604 Alex Griffing 402 Warren Weckesser I have the impression that you (Ralf) and Pauli have also been the most active in reviewing and merging pull requests over that time. Can I humbly suggest that you 5 discuss amongst yourselves who among you would like to be project leader? If there's only one of you who wants to do that job, then the decision process about governance is much easier. If there are several of you who want to do the job, it's still easier, because we can just work out a voting process to select you. I think we should consider the numpy governance model, only if there are none of you who want to be leader. Thanks for bringing up the discussion, Matthew [1] https://github.com/pydata/pandas-governance [2] https://github.com/matplotlib/governance/pull/1