We took the Software Steering Council charter out of the PR 98 and moved it into its own DRAFT PR.
The original PR in question is now called “Foundation of New Governance Model” and it covers the decision making guide, the list of software subprojects, the bootstrapping document, and the software subproject document.
We closed the “Decision Making Guide” PR that had been open and under discussion for a while and moved its contents into the foundations PR linked above.
For this call, we revisited the Board of Directors pre-PR draft.
Main point of discussion (which has been going on for a while, intermittently): what should be the explicit relationship between the BoD and the SSC? Should they be co-equals, or does one have authority over the other? If so, what is the scope of their respective roles, and how are decisions that impact both made?
Short discussion of an ombuds role in the project and whether it solves a subset of the “backstop” type issues of what happens when there’s a disagreement in procedurally sound decisions that have been made.
Interesting case study in the recent discussions of the Julia Arrow project, and how the discussion about if the subproject should be an official Arrow project.
We need to create a conflict of interest document to add to the next PR (the SSC + BoD PR)
Quarterly? Biannual? Annual? review of affiliations/activities that could be perceived as a COI. The need is to establish a process to evaluate COI issues
Next steps
Improve language in current COI policy
Establish working group to evaluate COI
Ask anyone nominated for BOD or SSC roles to reveal their affiliations and whether they’re willing to be subject to audit
The weekly governance call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-11AM PST on Fridays.
July 9, 2021
Attending: Brian, Fernado, Darian, Ana, Steve, Jason
Recap of last week’s conflict of interest discussion – suggestion of recruiting law students interested in technology and open-source governance for work in this space
The weekly governance call is open to the community members who care about governance issues. The call is held 9-11AM PST on Fridays.
July 16, 2021
Attending: Brian, Darian, Fernando, Sharan, Ana, Steve, M, Jason
We had a discussion of the open PR on the foundations of new governance.
Concerns surrounding inclusion in the new governance model - how can we ensure that voices from underrepresented groups in our SC can “get a seat” at the table in the future?
This section from the PR is probably the closest we have to addressing the challenge of a wide range of stakeholders: “The legitimacy of the consensus-seeking process is predicated on all stakeholders having their voices heard, so teams must be proactive in providing opportunities for all relevant stakeholders to provide input.”
Title of PR problematic - it’s not fully representative of what is being proposed
We didn’t land on a solution but invited further discussion and more fully understand the problem after today’s meeting
Rollin et al have invited developers of OpenOnDemand, as it’s also quite often used as a way to deploy Jupyter in many academic organizations.
Community/documentation issue: there will likely be a lot of demand on this team for help/support/best practices, esp. from non-experts in security who are facing deployment/usage issues in their organizations.
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 13, 2021
Attending: M, Steve, Darian, Fernando, Jason
This was another working call where we worked on the Board of Directors document.
The distinction between working groups that can be easily formed and dissolved by the BoD and standing committees that are written into governance and need a joint SSC and BoD vote to dissolve or add.
The concept of working groups that can be added and removed exclusively by the BoD still remains, but a subset of those groups are now standing committees that are enumerated in the BoD governance document.
The composition of the BoD should be exclusively drawn from the Jupyter Distinguished Contributors.
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.
ASF uses Apache Steve for voting. Voting used is Single Transferable Vote Apache STeVe
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 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