[python-committers] Identify roles of the BDFL

[Carol Willing]

> 
> On Jul 13, 2018, at 5:25 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> 
> On Jul 13, 2018, at 17:11, Carol Willing <willingc at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> If I look at the many important roles that Guido has played, I personally believe that he has been someone who encouraged many women (and I'm sure others as well) and most importantly provided a safe place to share ideas. If we reflect on Mariatta's PyCon talk and Summit talk, it's clear that we should not overlook this role as growth and improvements still need to happen here.
> 
> Maybe we refactor this particular role of the BDFL?  It may be that given Guido’s passion for this topic, he would still want to be active.  If so, he would certainly still have the stature, respect, and voice to continue to promote this within the community.  Of course, we don’t know whether that’ll be the case or not.

Make sense, and I have no object to refactoring. I sincerely hope that is the case, but mostly I want Guido to do whatever rocks his world.

> It’s a good question though: should the Council primarily concern itself with technical details of language evolution, or take on more of the other roles that Guido traditional performed?  Or do you see more of an overlap there (other than through the person embodying that role)?

Our messages crossed from a different post so I'm going to repost it here:

> [Barry] Procedurally, I think an informational PEP numbered in sequence is a good place for the “design” of our governance.

[Carol] I've been debating all day how to respond to this informational PEP re: governance. While I think it's great to cull good practices from other communities, I'm not sure that Python really fits into any existing governance that other projects use. IMHO Python is one of the healthiest language/community in the open source world. There's a reason that the saying "I came for the language and stayed for the community" exists.

There's also a reason the Zen of Python has been so popular for so long. It works.

While this may be an unconventional idea, I would love to look at governance through the lens of these 2 universally held beliefs as we begin to "design" our goverance (Thank you Barry for phrasing so well).

---

tldr; If what evolves embraces the Zen of Python and "I came for the language and stayed for the community", I am confident that the language will benefit technically. Encouraging people to work together even through disagreement and to respect that more than one solution is possible (it doesn't have to be one is great and the other stinks).


> 
> -Barry
> 
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