[SciPy-Dev] Moving SciPy project organization forward

[Ralf Gommers]

Hi all,

The next weeks/months I should have quite a bit of bandwidth, which I'd
like to use to push forward a few things related to project organization
that we've mostly discussed before but never really finalized.  The below
is a summary of my view on where we are and where we need to go.  To
discuss individual topics I'll send separate follow-up emails with separate
subjects.

What we have:

- Reasonably good docs for new contributors and core devs.
- Established community process for communication and decision making.
- A healthy group of active contributors and core devs.
- A project that's overall in good shape.

What we need:

- Set up a mailing list for the core team.
- Draft and accept a governance model & docs.
- Draft and accept a Code of Conduct (CoC) or "community guidelines" [1] or
similar.
- Agree on an FSA with NumFOCUS.
- Merge the roadmap PR.
- Agree on when to do a 1.0 release, and what still has to happen for that.

Mailing list
------------
This is not so we do more in private, but just to be more efficient in the
small number of conversations that already happens in private (like giving
out commit rights).  The core team has grown large enough that we tend to
forget people or use an old email address.  I will set this one up within a
week, probably using Google Groups (if anyone has a better idea, please
speak up).  My plan is to add all active core devs, and send other people
with commit rights a personal email about this to ask if they want to be on
it (because not everyone follows this list).

Governance model & docs
-----------------------
We had some discussions and a hangout on that last year [2].  In the
hangout we decided to give people some time to read up on provided info on
how this worked in other projects, the Karl Fogel book [4], etc.  I was
supposed to organize a follow-up, but failed to do so until now.  I will
send a separate email about this shortly.

CoC or similar
--------------
This is pretty standard to have nowadays, can be welcoming to new people,
and is required now by all projects that join NumFOCUS.  I'll send a
separate email about this later on - probably right after we've merged a
governance document.

Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement (FSA)
----------------------------------
We need this so we have all our ducks in a row to start dealing with
funding/donations in a better way.  We did get donations in the past, and
even used that money to support the MingwPy project to help improve our
Fortran-on-Windows situation.  This was OK as a one-off for a very small
amount of money, but this needs to be organized better.  We also do get
people who come up with ideas that would improve SciPy a lot and that we
could have supported with some money, had we had the infrastructure for
that in place.  Let's come back to this as well once we have governance and
CoC documents (those are prerequisites).

Roadmap PR (gh-2908)
--------------------
Let's just pick a date at which the thing [3] has to be merged, in the
state it is in then (updated for comments received).  And then start
improving it with new PRs if needed.  Leaving the PR open until everything
is perfect hasn't quite worked so far.  I'll propose a date 2 weeks from
now on the PR itself.

SciPy 1.0
---------
We've discussed this several times before.  We're now at the point where
most of the major gaps have been filled though, so it looks to me like it's
time to just pick a date for it (either after or instead of 0.19.0) and
then fix up the last things that we think we really need for a 1.0
release.  I'll send a separate email about this shortly.

Ralf

[1] https://github.com/scikit-image/scikit-image-web/pull/36
[2] https://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/2015-April/020636.html
[3] https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/2908
[4] http://producingoss.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/attachments/20160905/b033f911/attachment.html>