@afshin gotcha - thanks for the update. Do you have any suggestions on ways that I can be most-helpful to move this forward before my babypocalypse in early August? 
I am not sure. I have been reviewing your list of core projects document and trying to figure out how the delegation should work, because that part is unclear to me. I think maybe figuring that out is probably our next task here.
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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 – July 28, 2020
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Attendees
- Fernando
- Brian
- Darian
- Tim
- Chris
- Sharan
- Options for BoD candidate selection:
- Open elections model
- The existing board puts together a working group to find candidates similar to a corporate board: the working group puts up a candidate for approval by an approving body
- Federated elections (unclear what we fully meant on this)
- The working group version of BoD candidate selection is the one being proposed for the new governance
- In this model, we can recruit people from outside the project who have the skills needed for being on BoD (grant writing, organization skills)
- Our community comes from primarily the software side, which does not always overlap with the skills BoD selection requires
- If we’re reaching outside of the project to bring in high potential candidates for the BoD I would assume we need to pay them.
- How to increase the buy-in from the community:
- Maybe nominations for the working group to consider should be open.
- We need to have a pipeline that shows if you put work into the project you can rise through the ranks.
- An official mentorship channel could help increase community buy-in
- An honorarium, particularly based on necessity or time put in, that is opt-in and can be turned down could be baked into the model.
- Ideal target: a single SC vote that inaugurates a new governance model.
- Things required for that to happen:
- BoD is defined
- SSC is defined
- Projects that have an SSC delegate are defined
- Distinguished contributors group must be defined
- Voting procedures must be defined
- Things required for that to happen:
- Let’s start the Distinguished Contributors group right away (as in, today).
- Bootstrap group will be the SC.
- Should immediately grow beyond the SC, even as we are finalizing the new governance model.
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Hi folks, Thanks for the update. Just to clarify, is this the recap of the process?
- Steering Council puts together the working group.
- The Working group on behalf of the Steering Council will nominate people for the inaugural Board of Directors for Steering Council approval.
- The existing Steering Council approves the initial SSC projects and members.
- The Steering Council votes to adopt the bylaws of a new governance model.
Independent of this, the Distinguished Contributors group is formed by the existing Steering Council. We’re long overdue on recognizing a number of individuals beyond the Steering Council.
Thanks folks!
Carol, thanks for reading our meeting minutes The bootstrapping and election of the Board of Directors part of the governance work is at the “mostly lumpy piece of clay” stage rather than “highly refined pottery” phase. The bullet point in the meeting minutes you are commenting on is referring to the proposed process for board elections once the new board is already established (rather than during the bootstrapping phases). We considered a number of options for board elections and we believe this model has the best tradeoffs (we will document these things in the materials we submit). We are currently focused on getting the Distinguished Contributor PR finalized and ready and will then shift back to the other aspects of the governance model.
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 4, 2020
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Attendees
- Fernando
- Brian
- Tim
- Darian
- Chris
- Luciano
- Sharan
- Layne
- Speaking at JupyterCon core track on the new governance model
- Working call where we worked on the distinguished contributors draft document to open a governance PR: Add Distinguished Contributors #84
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 11, 2020
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Attendees
- Fernando
- Brian
- Chris
- Layne
- Darian
- Luciano
- We reviewed the draft of the Distinguished Contributors PR https://github.com/jupyter/governance/pull/84
- This is another working call where we worked on a draft for another PR soon for the Software Steering Council portion of the new governance model
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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 18, 2020
-
Attendees
- Brian
- Chris
- Layne
- Darian
- Sharan
- Tim
- Working call discussing the Distinguished Contributor PR
- Nominal purse
- Our intent was that the prize money was important and we wanted to avoid it having to be re-negotiated a lot in the future.
- We could pin the dollar amount to 500 and give the board of directors the responsibility to make sure those funds are available.
- This way if the BoD fails to raise funds the future discussion will only be about the budgetary restrictions.
- Modify to “a nominal purse of $500 per awardee subject to budgetary constraints”
- Criteria for nomination
- Modify to “must have produced contributions to Jupyter itself”
- Annual number of awards
- We’re specifically speaking about people that are contributing directly to Jupyter Projects.
- If the bar is sufficiently high, do we need a limit?
- “up to 10”
- Responsibilities/voting of DC
- We recognize the knowledge and experience that Distinguished Contributors bring to the project. From time to time, the Board of Directors and Software Steering Council may poll the group of Distinguished Contributors for their insights.
- Self-nomination
- If someone regularly self-nominates and isn’t selected, there isn’t a feedback loop.
- No action needed.
- Nominal purse
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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 25, 2020
-
Attendees
- Tim
- Brian
- Fernando
- Layne
- Luciano
- Sharan
- Darian
- Status update on https://github.com/jupyter/governance/pull/84
- Contacting the SC to vote
- Logistics of JupyterCon announcement questions
- On Software Steering Council.
- This meeting was irregular because several people had to leave halfway.
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 – September 1, 2020
-
Attendees
- Tim
- Fernando
- Layne
- Sharan
- Darian
- Task: contact the working group for distinguished contributors
- Working call on SSC and Core Projects draft documents for upcoming pull request.
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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 – September 8, 2020
-
Attendees
- Tim G.
- Fernando
- Darian
- Brian
- Layne
- Luciano
- Sharan
- Distinguished Contributors working group meeting tomorrow now that PR is merged unanimously
- We should open multiple PRs in draft mode so that mission and values are not diffusely defined in multiple places and instead one PR can point to a separate PR
- Working call on SSC and Core Projects draft documents for upcoming PRs
2 Likes
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 – September 15, 2020
-
Attendees
- Tim G.
- Fernando
- Darian
- Brian
- Update on the Distinguished Contributors working group
- We have a list of nominees, we are working on writing micro-bios
- We will produce a ballot during our next meeting
- Reviewed draft of the “Decision Making Guide” document
- Decisions will be made by consensus seeking with a low quorum voting phase.
- Each governing body, including software projects will maintain and document a voting body.
- Decisions will be made in clearly tagged and tightly scoped issues that are opened to address only the topic/question being voted on.
- Each existing software subproject will be responsible for bootstrapping that voting body.
- Each project should choose its own formal list of decision makers
- Decision makers for each project will probably roughly map onto ‘active committers’
- Discussed examples of how the “decision makers” could be defined for an example project
- eg: JupyterLab - Most senior members would have a private meeting where they discuss what size decision maker body is desired, works for the project, etc. They would act as the base decision makers and seed the rest of the decision making body based on the current active committer list and project impact.
- IPython would be another example, this project is currently less active, but there are members who have deep knowledge in the purpose and background of this repo so there may be non ‘active’ members of the decision making process.
- Discussion of quorum requirements.
- Failure mode of no quorum is explicitly people not acting in a helpful way is self-identifiable. ie: If Tim opens a pull request over Christmas while everybody is on vacation votes by himself and merges the change. The remainder of the group can simply reverse the change if they don’t agree the following week. If Tim was acting subversively this can be dealt with. If he simply didn’t know he can be asked not to act that way in the future. There’s no way to completely legislate away people acting out of culture, or in bad faith.
- Removed explicit quorum requirements in favor of language surrounding intent so projects can be as flexible as possible.
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I’m not exactly sure what a low quorum voting phase is. Typically, not achieving quorum is a red flag that the governing body needs improvement. What constitutes low quorum? 30%? 50%? 75%?
Unsure of the abbreviation SR?
The decision making guide likely needs an annotation on this point, but the actual idea wasn’t “low quorum” as the meeting minutes say. We actually came to a “no quorum” requirement because we wanted to allow for multiple stakeholders to have a vote without requiring them to vote for every single decision. The minutes reflect the evolution of that conversation as the call continued.
The “SR” was meant to be “senior” contributors
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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 – September 22, 2020
-
Attendees
- Tim G.
- Fernando
- Darian
- Brian
- Luciano
- Sharan
- Update on the Distinguished Contributors Process: voting phase is active
- Discussion on quorum: The language surrounding quorum may not belong in the decision making document.
- Example: A new repo is open and only 2 decision makers exist, they can’t have the requirement for a minimum number of voters.
- Spent the majority of the call writing and revising the decision making guide
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 – September 29, 2020
-
Attendees
- Tim G.
- Fernando
- Darian
- Brian
- Next week will work on JupyterCon talk
- Working call to post a WIP pull request for Distinguished Contributors
- On Quorum requirements or lack thereof
- Quorum and lack of participationare two elements that have led to deadlock within Project Jupyter in the past.
- We want to give projects a chance to balance agility with consensus.
- There has been concern raised that low/no quorum requirements will result in people pushing projects around arbitrarily
- We included language surrounding what the intent of the guidelines are, that people need to be welcome and heard. We can’t dictate that every person is a good-faith actor, but we can set up a culture where we make sure everybody is heard, and we can reverse decisions made inappropriately.
- A lot of this document is based on balancing agility vs hearing everybody out and making decisions based on consensus we’re doing our best to write this in a way that nobody is excluded from the decision making process.
- This document is intended to give a set of minimum guidelines to drive decision making in an explicit manner. We want to give room for teams to make autonomous decisions, there are a multitude of situations that could arise that aren’t specifically covered by this document but the intent is to have enough here to ensure that the process isn’t ignoring or silencing voices in the process of making strong decisions.
- On Quorum requirements or lack thereof
This is the draft pull request that came out of the most recent few meetings:
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 – October 6, 2020
-
Attendees
- Tim G.
- Fernando
- Darian
- Brian
- JupyterCon Talks
- Responses to feedback on “Decision Making Guide” PR https://github.com/jupyter/governance/pull/87
- Regarding quorum critiques: we want a consensus model where we value engagement and not participation
- Please see updates to the pull request for the results of this working call
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 – October 20, 2020
-
Attendees
- Brian
- Darian
- Sharan
- This meeting was shortened because we didn’t have a full cohort.
- JupyterCon catch-up
- Distinguished Contributors
- We should create a Google form with required fields for nomination
- Decision making guide PR
- We read through the comments in the open PR
- Does consensus building require a formal quorum definition?
- No. Any decision maker can simply say “we don’t have consensus” and consensus is broken (i.e., a vote is required)
- Addressing quorum in votes: if there is no consensus, then maybe it really is the case that a quorum is necessary for a decision to be legitimate
- Does voting cadence solve this issue?
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 – October 29, 2020
-
Attendees
- Darian
- Luciano
- Steve
- Brian
- Tim
- Sharan
- Sylvain
- We picked up the decision making discussion.
- Should we have a system in place that cuts people off if they miss enough votes in a given period?
- Should we have an average vote (yes/no/abstain) requirement
- Isn’t this just shadow quorum (yes it is)
- So why not require both a quorum and also a voting average requirement?
- What should the quorum requirement be then?
- The range of voter participation requirements averaged around ~60% based on the people on the call
- How should we think about whether the identity of each individual decision-maker needs to be public? Is your name attached to every vote you make or is just the final result what gets made public?
- Things we’re leaning towards after today
- We should have a minimum participation for decision makers across all projects. (no time horizon is established for how often this mechanism should last).
- We should have a minimum quorum for decisions that aren’t’ made by consensus
- We should make space for a person to proactively ask for a ‘leave of absence’ this should be treated differently than a person who doesn’t call or show up.