For mentorship, sure.
For leadership, I think this is unnecessary. Farming out leadership is unwise. Hiring an Executive Director would be better and having an unpaid board of approx 9 to 11 would be more likely to reflect the interests of the many different stakeholders.
I agree - I’d be a much bigger fan of finding paid positions (maybe part-time?) for leadership-style roles within the Jupyter community, rather than hiring consultant-style people outside the community. One of the challenges of doing “leadership things” is that they are often more invisible than doing technical work, and might be harder for individuals in companies, universities, etc to demonstrate their value. Perhaps compensating folks with money or a title can help offset this.
I wrote that note, but I think I wrote it distractedly. The idea was to populate the mentorship pipeline, because we currently occasionally find funds to pay for incoming interns but have a hard time filling mentorship roles to guide them and rely on volunteer mentorship. The word “leadership” in that point is a little misleading; it was not meant to indicate our project leadership roles ought to be filled in this way.
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.
Thanks Darian. Would you be able to expand on why the last bullet point is challenging?
Hi Carol!
The challenges in working on debugging that were relevant to last week’s conversation had to do with the differences between example implementation and how many things become de facto stakes in the ground. Here are the aspects of the conversation that I recall:
The group of stakeholders who are interested in this problem is very broad but diffuse. The issue is not a purely software engineering one because it’s not simply implementing some functionality, it is also a reference implementation and reaches across multiple sub-projects.
The solutions we settled on came from independent implementations that relied on prior art / defined protocols, (i.e. the debug adapter protocol defined by Microsoft and used in VS Code, the use of the control channel in the Jupyter messaging spec, provisional API updates in JupyterLab core as proof-of-concept before migrating down to lower levels of the Jupyter stack).
There will not be any governance meetings for the rest of 2019.
Attendees
Next steps?
Fernando: AGU next week, then planning to sync with Brian to create first draft of proposal based on all currently accrued materials and ideas. To put out to the public for discussion and iteration after the holiday break.
Does it make sense for each steering council member to have a ‘deputy’ who’s being trained by the steering council member to be groomed as a future member?
Darian: let’s slightly formalize the next steps. Identify these to the SC and verbatim to Discourse, to clarify the following part of the process.
Darian and others willing to help out even with specific writing prompts, sections, etc.
Dangling bits?
Describe to the community a summary of the activity so far and provide evidence of the work done so far.
Idea: timeline for releasing draft (~ mid-Jan 2020) plus vote; A proposal, with a period to discuss, that, if a very active discussion is going on, we can extend once before the final vote.
Emphasize the importance of open governance moving forward for industry stakeholders.
I am very excited to read and think about the draft!
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.
Jan 07, 2020
Today’s call will be from 10-11AM PST. Sorry for the late notice!
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.
A clarification question on the three organisational bodies: should I read it as “one of these three” or “all three” as the proposed idea?
The current state of Brian and Fernando’s thinking is that the project’s governance would be composed of all three of the bodies.
Thanks Darian for the update. A few additional questions or clarifications on understanding for the three governance bodies:
Which body - “Organizational” or “Executive” - would have financial responsibility for the Project Jupyter project? One or both?
“Organizational” - Is it one member per institution/company? Or do subsidiaries of a company get a seat? For example, Microsoft owns GitHub and LinkedIn. Quansight has Labs, Open Teams, etc. Would these have a member per top level entity or by sub-org?
“Organizational” - Is there a thinking about the % number for community quota? 30%? Many of us have multiple roles: corporate and community. Which one is used to determine membership?
“Organizational” - Diversity - Great start to have companies fund additional diversity efforts. In terms of governance and representation in decision making/direction, will there be a quota for certain axes of diversity? For example, 25% or greater number of members should reflect gender diversity goals (25% representation comes from the non-dominant group). Is the commitment to diversity aspirational or is there a specific measurable target?
“Executive” - If “Organizational” and “Executive” groups have different standpoints on an issue, which one has priority?
“Executive” - Will this governance group, also have a specific goal/metric/commitment to diversity within its members? While there are many axes of diversity, it is known that non-dominant gender groups are underrepresented. Will there be a guarantee to commit to a specific minimum acceptable diversity?
Very cool to see this moving forward.
Thanks,
Carol
Hi, Carol, thank you for the thoughtful questions. We are still exploring things at a relatively high level, so we haven’t gotten too deep into the details. But your questions are spot on and going to be important for us to consider. Some initial thoughts organized by your numbered questions…
Not sure. We don’t want the “Organizational” body to be purely advisory, but we want to continue Jupyter’s tradition of putting important decisions in the hand of the people doing the work of the project (who would populate the “Executive” body).
This is a really good question and corporate legal and organizational structures are flexible enough that we may have to consider this on a 1-1 basis. But the goal of the “Organiztional” body is to have a place where organizations with less resources (universities) are peers with those with more (large companies), so it may not make sense to allow corporate subsidiaries to have seats.
I think we mentions numbers such as 25%, 1/3, etc. In terms of who gets community versus organizational seats, my initial thought is that anyone whose employer doesn’t have a seat would be eligible for a community seat.
We have been talking about diversity but hadn’t talked about this aspect specifically. I think it is a good idea to have diversity goals for the “Organizational” body seat, and for the mentors.
There are different models of this we are exploring. One is to make the “Organizational” body more advisory - but our experience of advisory boards is that they aren’t very useful. Another would be to partition decisions between the two (each makes decisions, but not the same ones). A third would be that the both participate on the same decisions, with some resolution approach. I think the underlying principle are thinking about those is balancing power through mechanisms.
We talked about the diversity of the “Executive” body briefly. Because the goal is for it to be representative, it will reflect (at least in aggregate) the population of the subprojects that elect representatives. In this model the primary place that diversity “happens” will be in the work of the subprojects the each individually elect a representative. This was precisely why we wanted the “Organizational” body to fund and help staff diversity mentorships and internship, as that is a meaningful way to impact the diversity of the subprojects.
Thanks Brian for the detailed response.
Item 6 probably deserves further discussion. Since I’m not fully clear on what the Executive body would do, I’m not sure that leaving it to the subprojects will result in diversity.
Hello everybody. Sorry for the late, late notice, but I just found out we need to cancel today’s call as neither Brian nor Fernando can make it.
I will sign into the call to notify anybody who shows up. Sorry again for the last minute cancellation!
As a reminder, today we are having our monthly community call at 9AM PST: https://calpoly.zoom.us/my/jupyter
Regular attendees of the governance call will join the community call first.
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.
Thank you all for your continued work on this, it’s great to see. Is there a timeline on consolidating and getting public input on this form? Or what’s the general outline of the process moving forward?