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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
Darian
Jason
Tim G.
We addressed the next set of questions we want the governance to answer. Today’s set of questions:
Teams and projects
How do we create project unity while supporting autonomous, smaller teams?
What is the official list of Jupyter projects and how do new projects become part of Jupyter? How are projects conducted and governed?
What are the “shared resources” of Project Jupyter and how are they allocated among the projects?
We had a discussion on stakeholders and who decides how much of a stakeholder each party is.
Different orgs have different ways to recognize stakeholders.
Node recognizes the people that ‘contribute’ (Show up on github, willing to do the work), as the stakeholders.
A much different example is Blender, they have a user base who is technical, and engaged, but not the same people that are actually coding the software.
Hey all - as discussed in the latest meeting minutes, I’ve refactored the questions from the last two weeks so that the first post simply has a bulleted list of questions for people to answer, and one of the replies to the thread are the comments and extra info that the governance team came up with. I’ve also created a new community forum user for these “meta/admin” posts: @jovyan
I think it would be good to add a comment to the posts by @jovyan (at least at the beginning of using the account) to clarify who/what this account is as well as explain it in the account’s profile.
I was surprised to see an account with that name and the Jupyter logo posting things. My impression (until I found this post) was that it reflects the official opinion of the current steering council after first thinking someone made the account to remain anonymous or it was one of the people on the steering council who didn’t want to reveal their identity. Basically confused.com
Good point - I mostly wanted an account that wasn’t attached to any one specific person. What is information that you think would clarify this? I can update the Bio, I could add the name “bot” or “admin” or something like that?
I don’t believe that the minutes from this week have been posted - now that you mention it, I’m not sure that I have access to the minutes doc? In the meeting we had discussed that some of the question prompts were a bit “wall-of-text-y” and it might be more helpful to split off all the extra information into a separate reply so it was easier to follow.
I just realized I don’t think users have bios on here…however I added “bot” to the “title” of the user, as well as to the name of the user. Does that work?