Possibility of Creating Some Governance FAQs

Meta Governance
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Continuing the discussion from What questions does a new governance model have to answer?:

I saw this topic and think that these questions (or at least some of them) could be a start for creating an initial set of FAQs that could help people search for and find specific information related to governance. The responses to these questions could include a basic answer and then link to the particular section of the governance documentation for more detail.

I know we may not have the answers to all of the questions yet - but it might be interesting to be able to track and respond to the ones that we do have. What do people think?

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Hi

I am posting a brief follow up on this topic as we did discuss a little about this in one of the weekly Governance sessions. Feedback was that there are a couple of ways to approach Governance FAQs.

The first way is to look at it from the perspective of the governance model refactor which where questions were created as a prompt to think about areas to cover as the refactor process takes place. And this is exactly what the previous post refers to. While the answers to these questions may not be so straightforward, I think it might be good to put these questions somewhere where people can see the evolving results of the discussions as the responses are refined. A key thing to communicate and make clear is that we don’t have all the final answers yet but we are still working through it.

The second way is to look at it from the perspective of someone wanting some general information about Project Jupyter governance. This is more generic and geared towards communicating key facts about what is currently in place and how it works. The main difference is that these questions can already be answered by the governance document itself. Some example questions could be along the lines of:

  • What is the relationship between Project Jupyter and iPython?
  • What is a BDFL and why does Project Jupyter have one?
  • What is the Steering Council and what do they do?
  • Is Project Jupyter an open source foundation?
  • Why is the governance model being changed?
  • What is the relationship between Project Jupyter and NUMFocus?

Each of these questions could have a short response and also include a reference link to the relevant section of the Governance document.

As I’m fairly new to the community, I am happy to have an initial attempt at answering these generic questions to see if my interpretation of the governance documentation is correct.

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I think this could be both an interesting exercise, and helpful for others in the community! Where do you imagine this information would go? On the discourse? In the governance repository?

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Thanks for the feedback @choldgraf :smile:! My initial thought is to do some draft work here in discourse as it has the concept of editable posts a bit like a wiki. Doing it here might also give it a bit more community visibility.

Once a set of responses are done and people are happy then it we could propose it as an update to the governance repository.

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I think that’s a good idea - the community forum already has some precedent for information like this (e.g. @betatim often writes longer and more-informative discourse posts with the idea that it can serve as a reference for others…e.g. How can I support mybinder.org?).

Perhaps we could create a “Governance FAQ” thread, and mark the top page as a wiki so it could be edited over time, and then tell folks that they can ask whatever questions they like in the threads below?

I guess a challenge here is that the text could be seen as “authoritative” so we should make clear this is a document “as seen from some members of the community” rather than the official guide or something

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Hi @choldgraf I’ve had a first go at putting some Governance FAQs together at Governance FAQs

Am fairly new to discourse so not sure how to convert to the top to be a wiki. This is my initial draft so am happy to get any comments or feedback.

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Awesome! I’ll take a look this week and provide my own thoughts etc. OK for me to make it a “wiki” now? The one trick there is that others could edit the text and it wouldn’t necessarily be obvious. Is that OK with you?

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Yes sure and no problem. It would be good to get a few more people engaged as we develop this.

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