[Numpy-discussion] Comments on governance proposal (was: Notes from the numpy dev meeting at scipy 2015)

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 5:41 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> 1) I very much agree that governance can make or break a project. However,
> the actual governance approach often ends up making less difference than the
> people involved.
>
> 2) While the FreeBSD and XFree examples do point to some real problems with
> the "core" model it seems that there are many other projects that are using
> it quite successfully.
>
> 3) at least in the XFree case, maybe the biggest issue was not the core (or
> the board), but the fact that discussions and decision making process were
> kept secret (and restriction to CVS, EVEN read-only) -- this does not seem
> to be inherent to the "core" model at all, and not how nupy will even
> operate.

This was an issue, but not the central one.  I would argue that the
central problem was that XFree86 had grown up slowly and organically,
to find itself at the heart of the Linux ecosystem.  At this point the
private developers-club aspect of XFree86 became a massive hindrance
to the huge pressure from outside to develop new stuff.

> 4) the biggest issue numpy has faced in years is a lack of people that
> can/will/do actually contribute code itself. there simply isn't a big group
> f folks waiting to step up and be the president. And the "leader", president
> of BDFL, etc, while primarily being a management role, needs to be fully
> technically competent -- there are very few people qualified at this point,
> and I suspect none of them want that job. -- in theory, one can manage
> without the technical competency, but does anyone have a single example of a
> successful open-source software project run by a good manager that isn't a
> top technical expert? All the BDFLs I know of are absolutely top of the heap
> technically.

I can't easily imagine someone without reasonable technical ability
wanting to lead the project - although it appears that technical
ability is overrated for technical management [1].

> 5) Sadly, at the end of the day, democracy is often a way to make very poor
> decisions.

I don't think the question here is whether to have democracy or not,
but what kind of democracy.   In fact the current proposal is a sort
of consensus democracy.  My interest is whether this really is a good
model for numpy.   For example, will this model lead to a lack of
accountability and coherent direction?  Will it make it harder for
other projects to interact with numpy and negotiate about numpy
direction?

> So -- it seems there is consensus that we need to formalize the governance
> of numpy. And honestly, I don't think there are any other options that would
> work at this point with the current community.

It is true, that this discussion needs some commitment.  That either
has to come from {Chuck, Nathaniel, Ralf} or very strongly from the
rest of us, and we don't have either of those conditions, so I think
we are going to fall back to the status quo by default.

Cheers,

Matthew


[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html?_r=0