[SciPy-Dev] SciPy governance model

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 5:01 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 4:15 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 3:32 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 3:24 PM, Evgeni Burovski
>>> <evgeny.burovskiy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 8:22 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:
>> [...]
>>>>> Of course that requires some formalization, but I think it's a
>>>>> considerably better system than the BDFL, for our case.
>>>>
>>>> It seems to me that the effort needed to formalize it is not worth the
>>>> benefit, specifically in our case.
>>>
>>> Well - as a broader community, I think we'll have to do this anyway.
>>> For example, I know that Stefan vdW wants to set up this model for
>>> scikit-image.   I am sure he'd be happy to help draft it, I know I
>>> would.  Maybe we could do that in relation to this PR, making sure
>>> that we set some reasonable time limit for getting it done, say 3
>>> weeks.
>>
>> It's still the case that this is a novel social organization you
>> invented that AFAICT has never been tested by any F/OSS project, and
>> directly goes against the F/OSS community's hard-won cultural
>> knowledge about what kinds of organizations work well (see e.g. [1]).
>> Now- these are not necessarily bad things! Our community is
>> legitimately different than a "traditional" group of F/OSS developers
>> in a variety of ways, and less encultured to the "traditional" way of
>> doing things. And social experimentation is great -- how else can we
>> find better ways to live? While there's a lot of wisdom and experience
>> in Karl Fogel's book, it's surely not the final word.
>>
>> But... we should also be realistic that when someone shows up saying
>> "hey I've worked out a better method of social organization based on
>> first principles and thinking really hard, it'll 100% definitely be
>> awesome", then historically it *usually* doesn't quite work out so
>> nicely as promised. And it's often difficult to effectively do this
>> kind of experimentation at the same time as doing the actual work of
>> like, developing software. "Choose boring technology" [2] applies to
>> social technology too.
>
> * I agree with boring technology, but I doubt you're really arguing
> that choosing a leader at regular intervals is novel in open source or
> elsewhere.

I'm arguing exactly that. (In open source, obviously; scipy is not a
nation-state.)

> Debian is an obvious example [1];

But the Debian Project Leader is *nothing at all* like a BDFL. In fact
their powers are extraordinarily limited; mostly it's just "convince
people to do stuff by talking to them" (i.e. "exercising leadership")
and "serve as a project figurehead". Which is what your links says!
They explicitly *cannot* make decisions about the technical direction
of the project; in the Debian system that power is delegated in a
complicated way to individual maintainers, mailing list consensus, the
CTTE, and GRs.

If I seem frustrated in discussing these topics with you, then this is
why :-(. As is probably obvious to everyone, I actually love geeking
out about this kind of thing! But when you make such misleading and
hand-wavy arguments it feels lazy, like you're more interested in
vague in-principle discussions than in actually trying to put together
a real system that can be implemented and help the project move on and
accomplish its real goals. I know that's not your intention and I'm
sorry if that sounds harsh. But at this point I'm having trouble
seeing how your comments are helping move things forward in any kind
of practical way.

> * I don't know if an 'election' is the right method of choosing
> someone, that's really up for debate.  Obviously an election is a very
> standard way of doing that;
> * I don't personally know of a BDFL system working well in the absence
> of the criteria I put above, but it would certainly be useful to have
> a look at a few examples.  Can you suggest a few to consider?
>
>> If scikit-image is set on doing this, maybe the pragmatic thing to do
>> is wait and see how it works out for them? I've seen zero appetite
>> from anyone else on this list for elections and such.
>
> I think your idea here is the BDFL is low risk and choosing a leader
> is high risk, but it seems to me that both have risks, and that the
> best way of assessing the relative risks is to consider and refine a
> couple of concrete proposals, with discussion of prior experience,
> where applicable.
>
> For the appetite thing, you are probably referring to the nervous
> atmosphere that surrounds any discussion of governance, which is
> presumably due to the strong reactions against any such discussion in
> the past.   I'm sure you'd agree that that 'get it over with as
> quickly as possible' is not the best way to come to a good solution.
> Having said that, if Ralf and / or Pauli do not have much interest in
> this topic, discussion will quickly become futile and
> counterproductive, and we will have to stop quickly to avoid making a
> mess.

I'm more referring about the part where scipy *has* a governance
document now that seems perfectly workable. It's not identical to the
one I would have written, but so what, there are lots of workable
models and this looks like one of them. I'm not seeing folks jumping
in eager to redo that process for unclear benefits.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org