TL:DR; I’d like to step down from the trademark committee and find a replacement. If you are interested, please let us know either in this thread or in any other way to the steering committee who will select a replacement.
Longer Version:
The Jupyter Trademark committee is a group of currently 6 people (Min, Matthias, Brian, Jason, Paul, Tim), who handle all trademark related questions. This include but not limited to:
Clarifying term of use when company contact us and say “are we allowed to use ‘Jupyter’ in this context”, or to “use the logo in this way”, and the tough task to sometime say No.
Find improper use of the Jupyter name and Logo that would damage the trademark and contact authors, potentially sending a cease and desist.
Granting exceptional permission to use the Logo / Name in a context which is generally not acceptable; though we haven’t done this one yet.
All these need to be done to properly protect the trademark; even if sometime we’d like to say yes, we are legally obliged to say No (or have an explicit contract listing the exceptional permission), otherwise NumFOCUS is at risk of loosing the trademark.
As you can gather from the above description this rarely requires Software/Programming knowledge, and we don’t ask you to be a legal expert.
There are not many request that goes through this committee, though one request can take a lot of back and forth and sometime need to follow-up with people to make sure things get done.
This would also give you some view about things that happen internally in jupyter governance; for obvious reason this is one of the rare mailing list which is private as request may be about some upcoming products, and about some unpleasant exchange asking people to redesign things they have carefully done.
While I’ve done my best to push some of the recent request recently, I have a lot of other things going on (i’m sure I’m not the only one), and prefer to get a replacement than start ignoring emails.
I’d be interested in filling in here. I’ve been looking for a way to contribute to the Jupyter ecosystem since it’s done so much for me and this looks like an interesting opportunity. My background is in electrical engineering and I’m currently working in software project management for a small company in Saskatoon, SK, Canada.
Please let me know if there is any more info about the selection process or if you need anything from me.
Thanks ! We’ll probably wait a week to gather all the interested parties, and the steering council will likely chose someone ! Looking forward to your contributions !
@carreau Thanks for the quick chat yesterday giving me some more details. I’d like to throw my hat into the ring as well.
I think with the brand-building efforts going on at FairOSS and the Jupyter project needs, I could contribute nicely here. I’m a program manager at Quansight too, so no stranger to follow up
It’s been close to a week since I reached out to ask for replacements, we’ll start discussing internally how we want to proceed. I’ll try to keep this thread up to date.
Much appreciation to you three for being willing to help.
I’m interested in volunteering for this committee. I’m a longtime Jupyter user, occasional contributor, and work for a company in the notebook space but with some distance from the Jupyter project. I’m interested in trademark law. And I have enough time for the foreseeable future to properly prioritize this work.
I added you to the list of candidates. We’ve setup an anonymous condorcet voting via https://civs.cs.cornell.edu/ for the Jupyter Steering council members. that we’ll close in about 10 days. We were not expecting that many candidates, so we may select more than one if other members of the TM committee want to give up their place.
Regardless of this particular outcome, I’m looking forward to work will all of you in the future.
I’ve also send a PR to list the various committee on the main website, in order for everyone to get proper recognition.
I’ve been a bit busy with JupyterCon and some work, I’ve now closed the poll and will look into the results and discuss the process of announcing the result with the current steering council.
We had 8 votes on the poll for 17 steering council members, with many people abstaining as they had no preference and were not sure how to do a choice.
William Stein was the winner of the condorcet vote, I’ll send PRs to update the governance, and for now will be the only one to step down from this committee, and we keep all of you in mind for future position as the governance is currently being refactored.
I also hope that we can get a better and faster process for future changes, I know that this change took quite some time and was chaotic.
