We are going to be posting meeting minutes from the governance refactor office hours in this thread to document the conversations we are having and also to give people who can’t make it to the office hours insight into what gets discussed.
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Meeting Minutes – June 25, 2019
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Attendees
- Matthias
- Darian
- Fernando
- Brian
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Expert Interviews
- Continued conversation on set of questions expert interviews
- We tentatively assigned interviewers to the list of experts and we are targeting finishing the interviews by the end of August (this accounts for summer travel that makes some folks unavailable for a few weeks).
- We will record (with consent), transcribe, and produce an anonymized, single summary of the input from all experts combined.
- Videos and transcripts will be destroyed after the new governance model is ratified. Our summary will be preserved.
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Community Input Proposal to proactively solicit input from the broader community: create a single Discourse thread in the Governance category, where members of the community can post links to primary sources on governance. These can be publications, talks, existing or new blog posts by the community members or third parties.
- Community input specifics:
- Purpose: the goal of this is to generate input for the editors to take under consideration. As such, the editors will read all the posts and the content they link to. We are not looking for full blown governance model proposals; we want brainstorming and careful thinking on important aspects of governance. Please use the Governance Questions to structure and organize writing.
- We will use diverse input mechanisms to be fair and inclusive (blogs, video calls, Discourse, …), while encouraging thoughtfully elaborated, high-quality input.
- Posts can be in a different language if needed. We can read in Spanish, French and German, will use Google Translate for other languages.
- The Discourse thread will use a “no crosstalk model”. Posts on the thread should be focused on linking to primary sources on governance, and not a reply to other posts in the thread.
- Community input specifics:
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Meeting Minutes – July 2, 2019
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Attendees
- Brian
- Peter
- Darian
- Tim
- Next week: with Fernando traveling, and others at SciPy, next week’s governance meetings are cancelled.
- Community input
- Last week’s meeting minutes described the process we are going to use for community input, Darian will open the discourse thread to kick this off.
- Questions:
- Who is invited to the weekly office hours?
- Brian: it is my impression that initially the current Steering Council was invited, but we can broaden the invite as needed.
- Especially as we have work to report from the expert interviews or broader community input.
- What video channels should we be using for the 9am PT and 10am PT weekly meetings? One of these (9am PT) is the office hours, the other (10am PT) is the editors meeting. Should we consolidate to a single video chat room, so people don’t get lost?
- What raw materials will the editors use in editing together a governance document? Brainstorming…
- Expert interviews
- Community input
- Survey and research on existing governance models of similar open source projects.
- Survey?
- Mission, Vision, Values
- No update, Tim will follow up with Lindsey and Paul and report back.
- Tim has emailed Lindsey and Paul requesting we all three take a crack at creating a ‘Principle’ from the values list each to present at next week’s meeting.
- Expert Interviews
- Goal: finish interviews by the end of August.
- Last week we talked about how we are going to use the expert interview.
- We are going to produce a single summary that mixes all of the interviews to keep it as anonymous as possible.
- We will run this final summary by all the interviewees for final approval.
- Darian: there is some merit to not releasing intermediate documents to allow our interviewees to speak frankly.
- Brian: as editors, we want to be transparent about the raw materials that go into the process.
- Tim: we should start with a low level of detail in the summarization, then release more if people need to understand the underlying summary more. It’s easier to release more than ‘un-release’ information. We want to respect our interviewees privacy.
- Brian: we can start with a summary that will help the editors, and then review which parts of that should be released.
- We then worked on the interview script.
- Who is invited to the weekly office hours?
How one does actually attend/participate the governance ‘office hours’?
Meeting Minutes – July 16, 2019
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Attendees
- Peter
- Matthias
- Fernando
- Darian
- Tim
- Tim will take a pass at the interview questions to give a final thumbs-up so we can start scheduling interviews for the month of August, hoping to finish all interviews by the end of the month.
- The weekly governance office hours call should be open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-10AM PST on Tuesdays.
- Matthias gave an update on GitHub organization support.
- Talked with some of the GitHub folks two weeks ago about GitHub enterprise.
- There is a difference between their on-premise enterprise and cloud-enterprise
- Cloud enterprise is neat, it allows to regroup multiple organization under the same umbrella and allow to:
- enforce policies across all repos of all organizations
- give some graphs (called insight) across all the orgs.
- A number of features are useful, only for enterprise so we would not use them; but would be interesting to try.
- We spent the rest of the call working on polishing the interview questions and making sure the high “star” value governance questions are covered in our interviews.
- We decided to post a final draft of the interview questions for the community to have an idea of how we approached these interviews, when that draft is ready.
- We are on target for wrapping up the questions by the end of July and reserving the month of August for the interviews.
(cc: @lresende The call is linked in this week’s minutes!)
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Meeting Minutes – July 23, 2019
The weekly hourly office hours call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-10AM PST on Tuesdays.
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Attendees
- Darian
- Tim
- Matthias
- Fernando
- Brian
- Luciano
- Jason
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Matthias started a conversation about whether our interview questions cover the “why” of the decision-making that took place in each of the questions we asked. In other words, when somebody tells us some aspect of their organization’s governance that is either successful or unsuccessful, the core value of our learning this is finding out how they have interpreted their response and why they’ve ended up the way they have.
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We spent time going through the interview script with this input in mind.
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We talked about sources of raw materials for the editors:
- Expert (people experienced in governance of other open source projects) interviews.
- Community input on discourse.
- Reading sources and references we are collecting (see below).
- Other open source project governance models.
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We began to compile a reading list for the editors and others to start to look at as sources of “raw materials”
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Talked about stakeholders
- Steering Council
- Core contributors
- Industry Partners
- Funding agencies
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Meeting Minutes – July 30, 2019
The weekly hourly office hours call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-10AM PST on Tuesdays.
- We did not have a quorum on the call, so we briefly checked in with each other but cancelled the call.
Are these calls advertised anywhere ahead of time? Or do we just need to remember their time in our own calendars?
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@choldgraf Since it’s a standing meeting, we only announce here if the next one will be cancelled. We’ve started adding this header to the minutes to remind people of time/place, but there’s no other medium of communication where we announce it.
The weekly hourly office hours call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-10AM PST on Tuesdays.
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The weekly hourly office hours call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-10AM PST on Tuesdays.
Meeting Minutes – August 13, 2019
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Attendees
- Darian
- Fernando
- Jason
- M Pacer
- Peter Parente
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Caught up on the context of what the interviews are: we are interviewing the group of experts that came out of our initial surveys.
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The main motivation of these interviews is to get to somebody’s core personal experience of thinking about and dealing with issues of governance (as opposed to what we can read elsewhere).
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Process of interviewing is not about riffing or solving an issue, it’s more like zeroing in on interesting episodes the way a therapist would.
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Plan for output from interview process?
- If recording is done on Zoom, there’s an auto-transcription service triggered by the recording.
- First pass: Privacy plan
- Recording asked to be made available only to interviewer by default, for the purposes of accurate note-taking.
- In addition, we will ask at the end if interviewee feels comfortable sharing the recording with the rest of the Jupyter governance group.
- Auto-transcript and notes will be shared with interviewee for accuracy.
- During, pause can be hit any time upon request.
- At the end, reiterate question about whether they think (looking back) whether it’s OK to share recording more widely.
- Second pass: These are privacy options we can offer interviewees (from most to least private):
- ___ This recording/transcript will be available only to Brian and Fernando, the editors-in-chief of the Jupyter governance project, it will be deleted along with the transcript. Please feel free to pause anytime.
- ___ This recording/transcript will be available to a working group about Jupyter Governance, it will be deleted along with the transcript, we will incorporate parts of that transcript into our notes with any personally identifying information removed. Please feel free to pause anytime.
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We moved the interviews deadline to the end of September (it used to be end of August, but we won’t be able to meet that).
The weekly hourly office hours call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-10AM PST on Tuesdays.
Meeting Minutes – August 20, 2019
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Attendees
- Brian
- Darian
- Fernando
- Jason
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Fernando gave a short report on his visit to the NSF. Will post public summary on Discourse and links to talk slides/video.
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Ask for Mission Vision Values exercise summary from Paul, Lindsey, and Tim
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Jason to send out email to others that can help with interviews beyond the steering council
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Meeting Minutes – August 27, 2019
The weekly hourly office hours call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-10AM PST on Tuesdays.
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Attendees
- Brian
- Darian
- Jason
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This meeting was brief because we attended the monthly community call first. We had an impromptu conversation in lieu of the normal meeting.
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We talked about how companies engage with open source and hiring contributors to open source projects.
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What is the value proposition to an employer to hire an open source contributor and to keep those people working on open source?
Meeting Minutes – September 3, 2019
The weekly hourly office hours call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-10AM PST on Tuesdays.
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Attendees
- Fernando
- Brian
- Darian
- Tim
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We started the meeting discussing how to corral limited time and resources to manage the governance refactor this year.
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Part of that was deciding whether every single interviewee should be interviewed.
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So far, Tim has conducted an interview and Darian has conducted one interview (although this was before the questions were fully formed and more informal).
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Next Steps
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Build out constraints in AirTable and post to discourse.
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Tim to move forward with more interviews.
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Is there a date by which a transition to a new governance model should be completed?
Right now it is hard to tell, as someone interested but not involved, what the timelines are and by when a proposal is to be expected. Other projects (like CPython) managed their transition in about 6 months (from Guido announcing his resignation to a new governance being in place and maybe even already elected). It is hard to explain to others (especially without a timeline to point to) why for Jupyter it is taking considerably longer. The vacuum created by the lack of information is then filled with rumours and speculation (which is never positive) :-/
Is there a date by which a transition to a new governance model should be completed?
There is. 
In the wake of the Jupyter Team Meeting in March, the intent was to utilize the remainder of 2019 to draft an initial governance model for review by the steering council.
Right now it is hard to tell, as someone interested but not involved, what the timelines are and by when a proposal is to be expected.
I would expect the proposal to come in mid to late December.
Other projects (like CPython) managed their transition in about 6 months (from Guido announcing his resignation to a new governance being in place and maybe even already elected).
The structure and community of Python are different in many ways compared to ours. We love their project and have learned a lot from them, but we operate independently and need to find solutions that are well adapted to our needs.
It is hard to explain to others (especially without a timeline to point to) why for Jupyter it is taking considerably longer.
If others are concerned, we encourage any party to attend the governance meetings to join our discussion and/or help on tasks. One issue the team has run into is that we built the structure of the governance committee around more participation than we’ve garnered at this time. The model for the process, as laid out in this discourse post, was to have Brian and Fernando act as an “Editors in Chief” model, to date, there’s been only a small trickle of content to edit.
The vacuum created by the lack of information is then filled with rumours and speculation (which is never positive) :-/
I haven’t personally heard rumors, but I would encourage anybody who has concerns or questions to attend the governance meetings (or use the discourse) and bring them up so we can discuss them. The process was intended to garner feedback, so let’s use it!
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This happens most often when talking with people who are external to the project. It is unlikely they will attend those meetings
What tends to happen is that you find yourself in informal settings discussing the pros and cons of open-source projects, sustainability and eventually governance comes up. There is no good answer for Jupyter, all we have is “there is an official governance model that you can read about.” and “the governance model has reached its limits and there have been efforts to change it”. If you are unlucky people ask for how long the efforts to change it have been going on.
From the three forum posts I am not sure I understand what inputs are being sought. Some more clarity on the format, content and possible outcomes from providing input would be good and help people with participating.
That’s very helpful input. Thank you. I’ll put some work into articulating more clearly what we’ve been working on and what would be helpful next.
Cheers!
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Meeting Minutes – September 10, 2019
The weekly hourly office hours call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-10AM PST on Tuesdays.
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Attendees
- Brian
- Fernando
- Darian
- Tim
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Discussion of the quickest path forward given the mandate and constraints set out in the Jupyter Team meeting in March.
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We had a conversation about community input and participation.
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Jupyter’s current governance model stands out from other open-source projects in a positive way where it comes to handling multiple stakeholders and funding sources. This is a difficult subject to handle. It’s not obvious what an analogous model of governance looks like because this is an area many open source projects stumble on. There is no cookie cutter governance model to adapt for Jupyter’s needs.
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Discussion topic:
- Preference falsification - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzjqjU2FOwA
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There are only so many governance models in practice. Many non-profits and corporations have governance models that serve multiple stakeholders and funding sources. Rolling a new governance model, like writing your own security library, is full of peril. Best practices within a governance (transparency, leadership, communication) are far more important than the structure of the governance.
Adding a link to my SciPy Keynote slidedeck: https://speakerdeck.com/willingc/jupyter-always-open-for-learning-and-discovery
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Today’s office hours unfortunately need to be cancelled due to scheduling conflicts. Sorry for the late notice!