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

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sat, Sep 5, 2015 at 8:08 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 5, 2015 at 7:14 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 5, 2015 at 4:20 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Thanks for replying, that is helpful.
>>>
>>> I'm going to write carefully, because I suspect we've only got this
>>> one shot at getting it right.
>>
>> Not sure why? "Change the governance document" is explicitly listed as
>> one of the steering council's powers, so I don't see what we'd lose by
>> adopting what we have now.
>
> In practice, I doubt that there will be any proposal to change the
> governance in the medium term, especially if the governance does turn
> out to be risk averse and conservative.

Whether there will be a proposal depends entirely on whether someone
(perhaps you) makes one :-).

Whether the proposal will be successful depends on many things, but
I'm guessing you'd have *more* luck getting traction in this
hypothetical future where you can point to how the project is
suffering from risk aversion and over-conservative decision making.
Right now everyone seems to be getting excited about getting stuff
done and trying out this proposed model, which seems like the worst
possible time to try and convince them that they're doomed to
stagnation.

[...]
>> No, by drama I mean situations where technical issues become personal,
>> and where people end up feeling emotionally hurt and disrespected and
>> so forth. I agree that vigorous debate is important, but strongly
>> disagree that veins bulging and violence are necessary or helpful to
>> success. (This is tangential to your main point, but I wanted to point
>> it out.) Since I happened to be reading Kate Heddleston's blog
>> yesterday, here's another relevant link...
>>     https://www.kateheddleston.com/blog/argument-cultures-and-unregulated-aggression
>
> The distinction is between a culture that welcomes expressions of
> disagreement with one that does not.  In practice, if a group is
> easily alarmed by expressions of strong feeling, most people will be
> careful about expressing disagreement.   This is of course a rather
> subtle point.  It is easy to say that we do welcome disagreement, when
> in practice what happens is that the person disagreeing will in fact
> be labeled as being impolite.

I worry about this too. But this is a culture thing, not something
that seems amenable to quick fixes; it requires buy-in from everyone
individually. In particular I don't see what it has to do with whether
we have a named leader or not -- being named "project leader" doesn't
make someone's emails particularly more or less likely to change how
anyone in particular thinks about things.

[...]
>> Yep. And like you said above re: IPython and so forth, the solution is
>> to confront that problem head-on and have the debate. Having a
>> dictator come in and dictate the outcome wouldn't help anything.
>
> Yes, I see I am not being clear.  I was claiming that it is difficult
> to have this debate without someone who will make the final call.
> That person doesn't 'dictate' but they have the final say when all the
> arguments are in.   If I am right, then, with the no-leader consensus
> model you propose, it will be hard to have that debate because it is
> harder to get to the final decision.

I suggest we try it and see :-)

-n

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