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

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 10:22 PM, Eric Firing <efiring at hawaii.edu> wrote:
> On 2015/09/04 10:53 AM, Matthew Brett wrote:
>> On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 2:33 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> I was just rereading the complaints about the 'core' structure from
>> high-level NetBSD project leaders:
>>
>> "[the "core" and "board of directors"] teams are dysfunctional because
>> they do not provide leadership: all they do is act reactively to
>> requests from users and/or to resolve internal disputes. In other
>> words: there is no initiative nor vision emerging from these teams
>> (and, for that matter, from anybody)." [1]
>>
>> "There is no high-level direction; if you ask "what about the problems
>> with threads" or "will there be a flash-friendly file system", the
>> best you'll get is "we'd love to have both" -- but no work is done to
>> recruit people to code these things, or encourage existing developers
>> to work on them." [2]
>
>
> This is consistent with Chris's first point.

Do you mean Chris' point that "I very much agree that governance can
make or break a project"?   Charles Hannum's complaints about NetBSD
are very specific in blaming the model rather than the people.   I
think the XFree86 story supports the same conclusion - that the
governance model caused a sense of diffused responsibility that lead
to bad decisions and lack of direction.

>> I imagine we will have to reconcile ourselves to similar problems, if
>> we adopt the same structures.
>
> Do you have suggestions as to who would make a good numpy president or
> BDFL and potentially has the time and inclination to do it, or how to
> identify and recruit such a person?

That's a good question, and the answer is that in the current
situation (zero interest in this discussion from the three current
members of the numpy leadership team) - no reasonable person would be
interested in that job.   That's the situation we're in, and so we
have to accept that nothing is going to change, with the consequences
that implies.   If the situation were different, and we had the
interest or commitment to explore this problem, then I guess we could
discuss other options including the one I suggested further up the
thread.

Cheers,

Matthew