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

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 1:53 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> 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]
>
> I imagine we will have to reconcile ourselves to similar problems, if
> we adopt the same structures.

I guess I just don't see how you think we can legislate ourselves into
having a vision. Like... we'll elect a volunteer to produce a roadmap,
and then if they don't we'll fire them (accountability!), leaving us
with no volunteer and no roadmap? How will that help?

The Jupyter/IPython project probably has one of the the most developed
roadmaps in all of open-source, since their grant-funded development
model requires them to actually commit to plans ahead of time. And
AFAIK the way they accomplish this has nothing to do with Fernando
sitting down and having visions; it involves dragging the "core" team
in front of a whiteboard 2x a year for a week, and seeing what they
can come up with. And I guess we have some tentative evidence from the
other thread that this strategy may work for us too...

I'm not sure how useful this focus on NetBSD is, given the elephant in
the room: the fundamental challenge for NetBSD is that NetBSD has no
compelling reason to exist; even its old distinctive feature of being
the most portable free OS (which is already an intrinsically niche
appeal) has been taken over by Linux. (And Linux, notably, has always
explicitly refused to have a roadmap [1][2]... it seems to be doing
okay.) Nonetheless, looking at the Hannum [3] post in particular, I'm
struck by how much it *doesn't* apply to us. In particular, his main
two prescriptions aside from "have leadership" are #6 and #7. #6 is
that the legal Foundation part of the project should restrict itself
to administrative activities and get out of technical decision making;
the draft governance document says "[The NumFOCUS] Subcommittee shall
NOT make decisions about the direction, scope or technical direction
of the Project.". #7 is:

   The "core" group must be replaced with people who are actually
   competent and dedicated enough to review proposals, accept feedback,
   and make good decisions.  More to the point, though, the "core" group
   must only act when *needed* -- most technical decisions should be
   left to the community to hash out; it must not preempt the community
   from developing better solutions.  (This is how the "core" group
   worked during most of the project's growth period.)

So he has nothing at all against the idea of a "core group", he just
thinks it should be competent and... basically follow the rules that
we attempted to codify in the draft governance document....?

-n

[1] http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9906/21/linus.idg/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Development
[3] http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2006/08/30/0016.html

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org