Chris' JEC and Board experience for June 2025:

Governance Executive Council
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This is a monthly experiment from Chris as part of the JEC’s efforts to open up communication and channels of transparency with the JEC and the board. He’ll do his best to keep posting these updates. He’s time-boxing them to about 15 minutes in an effort to keep them sustainable. This means they’ll be rough! He’d love feedback about whether this is useful or how they could be better.

Another month has passed! Here’s what has stood out to me from my perspective on the EC and the Foundation Board.

First, I gotta be honest I haven’t had as much open source time to spend on the EC level this month. This is because I’ve been working hard with the Jupyter Book team to improve our team and user documentation in advance of the Jupyter Book SciPy talk and follow-up paper. We have improved a bunch of our team processes to make it easier for others to contribute and get started, but it’s been a lot of work!

OK here’s some foundation and EC stuff:

The Foundation board elected Savannah as our first Board Treasurer! I’m super excited about this for two reasons. First, Savannah is great and I am grateful to her for volunteering her leadership to serve in this role. Second, the role itself is important to help the board understand its financial picture, which will make it feel less-risky to write and accept proposals for funding. I’m hopeful that this will help us take steps forward with funding more easily.

On that note, I’ve been prioritizing my time trying to make the most of the limited capacity that both the board and executive council have. One challenge is that everybody is super busy, and especially the Executive Council has a million different hats and responsibilities[1]. From my perspective, we’d be able to move more quickly and unlock funds for the project if we had more “executive capacity” dedicated to delivering on initiatives in between board meetings. This would give more time for somebody to work on proposals, run pilots, manage staff or contractors if necessary, etc. I think the board generally agrees with this - it just takes time to bootstrap executive capacity.

Another growing theme has been the need to encourage more collaboration and co-creation between the foundation and the jupyter community. The Foundation started building working groups with specific focus areas, and realized that in some ways it is creating “parallel groups” to things that already exist within Jupyter. For example, there’s a community subcommittee and a Community Building Working Group. I think we’ll all be more impactful if we find ways for groups like these to work together with shared goals (and ideally, the ability to request and use funds). This somehow feels related to the need for executive capacity, but I’m not sure exactly how. It takes a lot of time, effort, and creativity to build collaboration structures between volunteer organizations, and that’s basically what we’re talking about here.

Proposals I’d love to collaborate on

While I’ve been focusing my time on proposals that would unlock some executive capacity, there are a few others that I’m interested in actively pushing forward if I can find others that are also interested. I’ll share a few below - if anybody wants to work on them with me, I’m happy to either discuss or do some co-writing together.

  1. For example, I’ve now got a Jupyter Book hat, a Jupyter Hub hat, a JEC hat, and a Foundation Board hat! Oh and also none of this is my full-time job! So many hats! ↩︎

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