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

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

  • Attendees

    • Darian
    • Fernando
    • Jason
    • M Pacer
    • Peter Parente
  • Caught up on the context of what the interviews are: we are interviewing the group of experts that came out of our initial surveys.

  • 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).

  • 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.

  • 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.
  • 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

  • Attendees

    • Brian
    • Darian
    • Fernando
    • Jason
  • Fernando gave a short report on his visit to the NSF. Will post public summary on Discourse and links to talk slides/video.

  • Ask for Mission Vision Values exercise summary from Paul, Lindsey, and Tim

  • 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.

  • Attendees

    • Brian
    • Darian
    • Jason
  • This meeting was brief because we attended the monthly community call first. We had an impromptu conversation in lieu of the normal meeting.

  • We talked about how companies engage with open source and hiring contributors to open source projects.

  • 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.

  • Attendees

    • Fernando
    • Brian
    • Darian
    • Tim
  • We started the meeting discussing how to corral limited time and resources to manage the governance refactor this year.

  • Part of that was deciding whether every single interviewee should be interviewed.

  • 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).

  • Next Steps

    • Build out constraints in AirTable and post to discourse.

    • Tim to move forward with more interviews.

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. :slight_smile: 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 :slight_smile:

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.

  • Attendees

    • Brian
    • Fernando
    • Darian
    • Tim
  • Discussion of the quickest path forward given the mandate and constraints set out in the Jupyter Team meeting in March.

  • We had a conversation about community input and participation.

  • 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.

  • Discussion topic:

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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!

Bummer. I was going to attend today.

That is a bummer. Discourse needs a :broken_heart: button next to the heart one.

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To echo @willingc 's point, I had put together a list of governance information / models / etc of other open source projects in my initial attempt at jump-starting this process last October:

Maybe some of that will be useful.

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Meeting Minutes – September 25, 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.

  • Attendees

    • Brian
    • Fernando
    • Carol
    • Tim
    • Jason
    • Darian
    • Zach
  • We discussed cross project communication:

    • Project is large and it is difficult for any person to follow work
      across the project.
    • This makes it difficult to do or stay informed about cross project
      architectural work.
    • Would be helpful to have a monthly mechanism for orgs/repos to report
      activities, work, from the previous month, as well as plans for the
      coming month.
    • Maybe we should have each repo/org appoint a communications point
      person who sends a few bullet points with links to a centralized
      location each month.
    • We would likely need a person to organize the effort and publish the result.
    • Maybe the communications point people could rotate?
    • We talked about using the jupyter/newsletter to collect this
      information, with the org level communications point person submitting
      a PR each month.
    • Would need to work out a schedule.
  • Zach may be able and willing to help us bootstrap this process.

  • Visibility of governance work:

    • The weekly minutes of the governance meeting posted to discourse are
      helpful, but still not sufficient for people observing to understand
      the project plan for the governance work, and where things are at
      currently.
    • It may help for us to create a project plan for the governance
      refactor, with rough steps, goals, timeline, etc.
  • Python Leadership group:

    • Meets 1x week with 5 people, with preapproved agenda.
    • Use GitHub to track tasks, work minutes.
    • Report out periodically.
    • They have expectations around regular attendance, and onboard people to that.
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Meeting Minutes – October 1, 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.

  • Attendees
    • Brian
    • Tim G.
    • Tim H.
    • Jason
    • Darian
    • Ana
  • Reviewed the Governance Refactor Proposal
    • Goals
      • Does this still reflect our plan?
      • Should we make this document public?
    • Read silently for 5m
    • “What is a reasonable amount of time?” In a different set of meeting minutes (3 Sept.) we said we’d refactor governance “this year”, so perhaps the plan document should reflect this.
    • Makes sense to update and publish this document.
      • Updates:
        • Be clearer about a reasonable amount of time.
        • Check language related to original intent of document vs current state.
        • Attendees of this meeting to make edits.
  • Google Drives Provided by NumFOCUS?
    • Let’s explore this.
  • Expert Interviews
    • Two expert interviews are completed, processing into transcripts and summaries.
    • Two more are either deferred or otherwise complete.

Meeting Minutes – October 15, 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.

  • Attendees

    • Fernando
    • Brian
    • Zach
    • Chris
    • Tim G.
  • Plan for Brian/Fernando to prepare a first draft for public comment by mid-December, with help from others as available.

  • Organize initial writing around the stated questions – this helps parallelize as well as covering all the ground of what has been raised already.

  • How to surface intermediate thinking process to better engage the community?

    • Post the current 16 driving questions on the governance repo or Discourse?

    • One issue with Google Docs is that it makes it hard to explore forking options, it strongly drives towards consensus based on small changes that need to converge into a single version. Post instead drafts on Github repo?

  • What needs to get done before we start to draft answers to the governance questions?

    • Completing and digesting the expert interviews [Tim]

    • Completing and digesting the MVV work [Brian]

    • Studying other governance models

  • Put the governance proposal through the JEP process in a formal manner?

    • It puts a timebox on the process and structures the community feedback.
  • Action Items

    • Brian to make an introduction for Tim to conduct another expert interview

    • Brian to pick up work on MVV

    • Brian to create Google Team Drive for Jupyter Governance and migrate content.

    • Tim to conduct one additional interview.

    • Jason to conduct one additional interview.

    • Each week, Fernando and/or Brian post to discourse with a list of questions in a category and a summary of how our current governance model answers those.