[Numpy-discussion] Governance model request

[Ryan May]

This has to be one of the most bizarre threads I've ever read in my life.
Somehow companies are lurking around like the boogeyman and academics are
completely free of ulterior motives and conflicts of interest? This is just
asinine--we're all people and have various motivations. (Having just gotten
out of my university after 15 years, the idea that academics are somehow
immune to ulterior motives and conflicts of interest makes me laugh
hysterically.)

The sad part is that this worry completely unnecessary. This is an open
source project, not international politics, and the end goal is to produce
software. Therefore, 99.9% of the time motives (ulterior, profit, or
otherwise) are completely orthogonal to the question of: IS IT A GOOD
TECHNICAL IDEA? It's really that simple: does the proposed change move the
project in a direction that we want to go?

Now, for the 0.01% of the time, where nobody can agree on that answer, or
the question is non-technical, and there is concern about the motives of
members of the "council" (or whatnot), it's again simple: RECUSAL. It's a
simple concept that I learned in the godawful ethics class NSF forced grad
students to take: if you have a conflict of interest, you don't vote. It's
how the grownups from the Supreme Court to the college football playoff
deal with the fact that people WILL have conflicts; potential conflicts
don't disbar qualified individuals from being included in the group, just
from weighing in when their decisions can be clouded.

So how about we stop making up reasons to discourage participation by
(over-)qualified individuals, and actually take advantage of the fact that
people actually want to move numpy forward?

Ryan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/attachments/20150922/6fc8a9c7/attachment.html>