[Numpy-discussion] NumPy Governance

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

2011/12/5 Stéfan van der Walt <stefan at sun.ac.za>:
> As for barriers to entry, improving the the nature of discourse on the
> mailing list (when it comes to thorny issues) would be good.
> Technical barriers are not that hard to breach for our community;
> setting the right social atmosphere is crucial.

I'm just about to get on a plane and am going to be out of internet
range for a while, so, in the spirit of constructive discussion:

In the spirit of use-cases:

Would it be fair to say that the two contentious recent discussions have been:

The numpy ABI breakage, 2.0 vs 1.5.1 discussion
The masked array discussion(s) ?

What did we do wrong or right in each of these two discussions?  What
could we have done better?  What process would help us to do better?

Travis - for your board-only-post mailing list - my feeling is that
this is going in the wrong direction.  The effect of the board-only
mailing list is to explicitly remove non-qualified people from the
discussion.   This will make it more explicit that the substantial
decisions will be make by a few important people.   Do you (Travis -
or Mark?) think that, if this had happened earlier in the masked array
discussion, it would have been less contentious, or had more
substantial content?  My instinct would be the reverse, and the best
solution would have been to pause and commit to beating out the issues
and getting agreement.

See you,

Matthew