[Numpy-discussion] Governance model request

[Matthew Brett]

Hi Travis, and all,

You might have seen I was advocating for having someone who takes
final responsibility for the project, partly to get discussions
unstuck, as you said.

I agree with Chris, that at this stage, there is no-one who could be
Benevolent Dictator for the project.  It seems to me that (nearly)
everyone would agree that, if there is a leader, we would not want a
person who dictates, but someone who is good at putting in the hard
work and time it takes to hear all the arguments, and guide people to
agreement, where that is possible.  If there is a leader, I think we
should select them for those skills.

For the proposal that you join the steering committee, I see two problems.

The first is, that the members of the steering committee have to be
the people who are keeping in touch with the day to day work of the
project.   I am sure you would agree that, in the past, you have not
had enough time for that.  Your recent emails about the new work you
want to do, also imply that you may be too busy to get involved in the
detailed discussions needed for getting the code merged.  In any case,
I think you'd also agree that in the past you have hoped that you
would have more time for numpy than you did.

The second problem is that you have a potential conflict of interest,
in that it is possible for the needs of Continuum to conflict with the
needs of numpy.   I believe, from previous emails on this list, that
you don't think that is very important, but I continue to disagree
about that.   For example, see this interview with Linus Torvalds,
where he talks about going out of his way to make sure that people can
trust his decisions, despite the fact he is paid to work on Linux [1].

In practice, the most obvious step that I can think of, is to defer
the decision as to whether you are on the steering committee for six
months.  I guess over that time you will be working with the other
numpy developers more closely.

I should say that Stefan and I are working on a governance proposal,
in this case for scikit-image, where we split the governance into 1)
the developers doing the work and making the day to day decisions and
2) the trustees, usually from other relevant projects, or
no-longer-active developers, who make sure the project does not go off
the rails.   I think you'd be an excellent and obvious trustee, in
that model.

Cheers,

Matthew


[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18419231