[Numpy-discussion] composition of the steering council (was Re: Governance model request)

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 7:25 AM, Marten van Kerkwijk
<m.h.vankerkwijk at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
>
> p.s. Independently of rules, I don't see how Travis would not qualify even
> from current work, given that he has just committed to actively try to
> improve/generalize dtype.

Just to clarify what's happening here (at least as I understand it --
hopefully Travis / Continuum folks will be in communication with the
community at some point), it sounds like the plan is not so much that
Travis will be working on the dtype stuff (he has no time) as that
he's hiring other people to work on it:

"Travis (Continuum) is working with 3 part-time people (currently
Kerry Oliphant, Christian Tismer and Yarko Tymciurak) with additional
advisement from Irwin Zaid, Jeff Reback, and Antoine Pitrou.   The
target of this effort is two Python packages (currently called memtype
and gufunc) which could serve as prototypes and/or scaffolding and/or
implementations of the same ideas that get into NumPy.    They will be
working and communicating with the NumPy community.   Travis's
brother, Kerry Oliphant, is leading the group and tasked with
communicating with the broader community about the activities of this
team."

-- https://bids.hackpad.com/Python-Stack-Refactoring-uU9RVWkMc0J

So this seems orthogonal to the steering council discussion --
decisions about steering council membership are 100% about actual work
done by actual individuals, without any regard to who is writing
checks to whom. (This is a key part of the whole
maintaining-independence, keeping-corporate-influence-at-arms-length
aspect of the governance plan.)

(It also sounds like Continuum's current plan is that instead of
improving numpy directly, they will be off building a toy array
library to explore the idea of implementing this stuff directly in the
core interpreter as builtin types. And in parallel, those of us who
are interested in this stuff in numpy will be getting to work on
actually implementing new dtype stuff in numpy. And I guess at some
point we'll compare notes and see how close our two implementations
ended up being in retrospect? Right now I don't understand any path
for their work to be useful to numpy, and it sounds like for now the
numpy team should just proceed with our existing refactoring plans on
the assumption that nothing will come of the Continuum work, and if
that's wrong then it will be a pleasant surprise. But Travis is aware
of my thoughts here and keen to do it this way anyway, and it's their
money and time, so, up to them really...)

-n

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