Governance Office Hours Meeting Minutes [archives up to 2022 April 22]

The weekly governance call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-11AM PST on Fridays.

August 20, 2021

  • Attending: M, Darian, Ana, Sylvain, Jason, Fernando
  • Recap of some of the ideas from last week to catch everybody up:
    • BoD members (nine-member group) to be drawn from the JDC group
      • A rotating cast of ⅓ outgoing, ⅓ mid-term, ⅓ new members
    • Introduction of the concept of standing committee (which requires a governance change to dissolve) in addition to the extant notion of working groups
    • These two concepts are written in a nascent form in the BoD document but need to be fleshed out

The weekly governance call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-11AM PST on Fridays.

August 28, 2021

  • Attending: M, Darian, Fernando, Sharan, Ana, Jason
  • This meeting was a working call dedicated to working on the draft of the Board of Directors document incorporating the ideas of the last couple meetings into language in preparation for a forthcoming PR.

The weekly governance call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-11AM PST on Fridays.

September 3, 2021

  • Attending: M, Darian, Fernando, Sharan, Brian, Jason
  • In reviewing the ideas about where the Board of Directors are drawn from (i.e. the Jupyter Distinguished Contributors as per the latest conversations), we explored the idea of whether we should focus on people who have been more active more recently.
  • Sharan shared:

Summary of Board of Directors discussion

We are looking for a model for creating the new Executive Board (using that term for now, we can settle this later) that balances the following constraints:

  • Pulls in from active members of the community who have shown sustained effort and contributions.
  • Recognizes that this is a commitment to doing new work for the project. It’s a (volunteer) job, not a prize.
  • Mixes experience in needed areas with the growth of new leadership.
  • Creates, proactively, space for voices that have been historically under-represented or excluded (either in Jupyter specifically or in tech/open source at large).

In discussion today, and learning from the experience and practices of the Apache community thanks to Sharan’s input, we’ve been pondering the following plan (this is still extremely raw, capturing it here only so we have clearer notes for the community and for next week’s meeting to be more effective, not to suggest this being a formal proposal yet):

  • Refine the JDC process slightly, to
    • lower the time window of expected participation from 2 years. Both 1 ½ and 1y have been proposed, will discuss more next week (todo: ask Sharan if there’s any data on average length of participation in the Apache community, even absent hard limits).
    • Eliminate the annual cap on new members. Apache has no such limits and their “Apache members” group (from where certain leadership roles are drawn) currently stands at ~700.
  • Emphasize the need for mentorship and leadership growth as an explicit part of the EB’s mission. This should be tiered, so that for example “shadow/assistant” members then play a role of connecting the board to the bigger community (and working groups?) to feed the pipeline of new members interested in these roles.
  • Potentially use these tiers of mentorship and activity as ways of defining the pool from where new EB members would be drawn. JDC membership would be a necessary but not sufficient condition, to maintain EB growth in line with our principle of leadership remaining aligned with active participation (which can take many forms and isn’t measured only by total time allotted, which can vary wildly due to personal/professional resources available).
    • How to specifically structure this will need to be discussed, but this can be a mechanism to support the definition of the pool of EB members that moves away from purely visibility, seniority or personal popularity.

The weekly governance call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-11AM PST on Fridays.

September 10, 2021

  • Attending: M, Darian, Fernando, Sharan, Brian, Jason
  • Review and update Board of Directors document
  • What should the duration of involvement with the project for JDC candidates be? Currently it is two years and that is possibly too restrictive.

The weekly governance call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-11AM PST on Fridays.

September 17, 2021

  • Attending: M, Brian, Ana, Fernando, Chris, Sharan
  • Review and update Board of Directors document

The weekly governance call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-11AM PST on Fridays.

September 24, 2021

  • Attending: M, Brian, Ana, Fernando, Jason
  • Substantive progress has been made in the past few weeks related to the high level structure for the executive function of our governance model.
  • We have archived a previous version for the Board of Directors doc which had become an unwieldy record of many versions and iterations of ideas for structure from the past two years. We built the new document using the archive document so that we don’t lose the comments and feedback that folks had provided in the past. (Both are under Executive Board in links above)
  • Renamed Board of Directors to Executive Board to reflect the unique nature of how this group will function. This board will lead on a combination of day to day leadership of the org (something that mirrors the work of executive leadership/ED/CEO) and strategic decision making and vision setting which would traditionally be the function of a non profit Board of Directors
  • We are converging on being able to launch the Executive Board draft in the near future for feedback and review
  • In the Executive Board Document we will use the Google commenting function for anything that needs to be resolved before transition to GH PR’s. There may still be open discussions in this doc which can be done on GH - those comments will be made inline on the Google Doc
2 Likes

May I suggest to add the governance to Jupyter calendar on jupyter.org ? Even if it overlaps with many other things like the security workgroup meeting.

I know there are concerns to not have too many people in calls, but I don’t believe that adding this to the calendar will change that much the number of participant.

1 Like

Done! I can remove it at any point, if it creates any issues.

1 Like

Here is an interesting case study in how Debian gives maintainers a lot of autonomy and control, but still has a Technical Committee that can override decisions when they broadly impact the community. This is about decisions in the Debian community about the which command-line program: Debian's which hunt [LWN.net]

1 Like

October 29, 2021

2 Likes

Nov 05, 2021

  • Attending: Brian, Fernando, Ana, Zach, Jeremy, Tony, Adam Patterson for the first hour (daylight savings time confusion), then Steve, Sharan and Darian joined.

  • First part of the meeting: wrap up plans to move forward with the notebook6/7/retrolab plans

    • How do we prioritize and proceed so the nb7 plan happens in 6 months and not in 3y?
    • From the Notebook Wednesday meeting - We need a QA team! Many of our users don’t really know how to report any issues.
    • We need a tactical approach to this problem, with some project management, tracking, Q&A, etc.
    • Wednesday Notebook team meetings will become coordination/activity meetings for this effort.
    • Tony volunteered to start some project tracking structure for about a month unable to fully manage beginning to end.
    • Accessibility is a crucial topic to be addressed in the near term. It will be a positive for the transition: something new that solves an important problem, not only “upgrade so you’re not left behind.” It’s important to find these specific advancements, so we’re not only helping folks keep what they had before, but actually improve their experience as part of the transition.
    • Idea: could we have a super-pre-release version of nb7 out for the new year?
      • Goal would be to set up the repo structure, finalize decisions on where issues go, etc, so that we start 2022 with the code structured as necessary for the transition, so teams can begin setting up testing against a known target, etc.
  • Second part of the meeting: back to drafting governance docs.

    • PR 103 has votes to pass - pinging last SC members in case they’d like to vote, but we now begin planning its implementation as it seems certain to pass. Vote formally closes on Nov 12, but can be closed earlier as we have 14 yes votes.
    • Charter template for standing committees and working group. Ana to draft based on Community Building Committee and NF template for DISC

Nov 12, 2021

Attending: Brian, Fernando, Sylvain, Sharan, Darian, Jason.

Given the urgency and importance of the discussion around the notebook v7 transition, and the positive reception so far to the ideas we put out after @Zsailer’s posts, we figured today we should double down in moving the ProtoJEP a bit closer to a real JEP.

Because we haven’t had time for key Notebook folks to pitch in, we started gently with some draft text on my fork of the JEP repo. If by next Wednesday we see no major concerns, I’ll make a formal PR out of this into the JEP repo itself.

But feedback is welcome already there if anyone is interested, it’s just that we wanted everything to be openly and quickly, while giving key stakeholders a chance to pitch in before a formal JEP was created.

Today’s call only will be hosted on this channel: Launch Meeting - Zoom

This week’s governance call only will be hosted here:

The weekly governance call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-11AM PST on Fridays.

Dec 3, 2021

1 Like

Dec 10, 2021

  • Attending: Ana, Darian, Fernando, Brian, Jason, Sylvain
  • Scheduling: the last two Fridays of the year are holidays (Christmas Eve and New Years), we’ll be canceling a few of the upcoming meetings, Darian will update the calendar entries
  • Worked on Executive Board document to resolve comments and do another pass at content which hasn’t been reviewed for some time

Jan 21, 2022

  • Attending: Tony Fast, Brian Granger, Jason Weill, Piyush Jain, Ana Ruvalcaba, Afshin Darian, Fernando Pérez.
  • Bootstrapping decision-making bodies for some projects like nbviewer that currently don’t have one. We will ping the Jupyter Distinguished Contributors list in case anyone there would be interested in participating.
  • Tony Fast will look into whether he can commit some bandwidth to shepherd this type of process for some of the web-facing projects that are now lacking in this regard. He will report back over the next few days.
  • Jason will look at some of the broken links and make a suggestion/PR to fix the more visible ones for now.

Jan 28, 2022

  • Attending: Tony Fast, Brian Granger, Jason Weill, Ana Ruvalcaba, Afshin Darian, Fernando Pérez, Sharan Foga, Paul Ivanov, Jason Grout
  • Review/Editing of Standing Committees and Working Groups draft

Feb 4, 2022

  • Attending: Tony Fast, Brian Granger, Jason Weill, Ana Ruvalcaba, Afshin Darian, Sylvain Corlay
  • Review comments left on the Standing Committees and Working Groups draft
  • Darian will open a draft pull request for the Standing Committees and Working Groups documents

Feb 11, 2022

  • Attending: Jason Weill, Jason Grout, Fernando Perez, Afshin Darian, Ana Ruvalcaba, Matthias Bussonnier, Sharan Foga, Gayle Ollington, Sylvain Corlay
  • Introduction to Gayle – Community Events Manager for Jupyter (employed at NF)
  • Check-in re: bootstrapping SSC and decision-making bodies (and updating an email to send to the Steering Council)
  • Check-in re: Standing Committees and Working Groups PR