On Sun, Jan 15, 2017 at 8:15 AM, Pauli Virtanen <pav@iki.fi> wrote:

Interesting discussion so far!

Sat, 14 Jan 2017 10:03:43 -0800, Matthew Brett kirjoitti:
[clip]
> What do you think about the idea of having regular state-of-scipy
> reviews to make sure we're conscious about keeping on track, assessing
> risks, improving process?

For the technical aspect, this sounds something like the Scipy roadmap
(https://github.com/scipy/scipy/blob/master/doc/ROADMAP.rst.txt), and the
discussion leading to it, in conferences and online in public.

Something like regular prompts for discussion of technical and
organisation roadmap could be useful. At minimum, this could be simply a
(bi-?)yearly post on the mailing list, to remind to update the roadmap
and to summarize / bring up / discuss any relevant organisation updates /
issues in the preceding period.

I quite like this idea. Documents like a roadmap can easily go out of date if they're not actively maintained. Having a critical look at it once or twice a year will be helpful. Also +1 for adding some organizational items to it (I'm thinking CoC, FSA, etc. should have been on there).

The list of people on the steering committee also needs to be updated with this kind of frequency.

How about doing this around 1 January and 1 July every year?

I'm not sensing a lot of enthusiasm for the fixed-term/election idea, so I'd gently suggest to not go down that path but instead look at the regular review above as an opportunity to bring up concerns regarding any aspect of our organisational structure (we can put in wording like that, PR welcome I'd say).

Cheers,

Ralf