[Numpy-discussion] Comments on governance proposal (was: Notes from the numpy dev meeting at scipy 2015)

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 11:46 PM, Stefan van der Walt
<stefanv at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Hi Matthew
>
> On 2015-08-26 10:50:47, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> In short, the core structure seems to be characteristically
>> associated with a conservatism and lack of vision that causes
>> the project to stagnate.
>
> Can you describe how a democratic governance structure would look?
> It's not clear from the discussions linked where successful
> examples are to be found.

Ah yes - as I was writing at the top of the xfree86 summary, it's
difficult to assess governance models, because you cannot tell if a
project that has a particular governance model would have been more
successful with another model.   For example, would clang be competing
so successfully with gcc, if gcc had had a different governance model?
 Would Apache be further ahead of the many competitors in the
web-server space with different management? Difficult to know.

The advantage of studying forks is that they usually arise from
disagreements about how a project is managed.  All other things being
equal, we might expect a fork to fail, given the general aversion to
forks and the considerable new work that has to be done to get one
going. So, if a fork succeeds in the long term, that is probably an
indication that the governance / management of the fork is indeed an
improvement on the previous model.

So, in answer to your question, it's difficult to know if a particular
governance model is successful.   It isn't enough that a project has
lasted, or is still active, because there are so many factors in play.
  On the other hand, I think it is possible to point to models that
have a tendency to fail in particular ways, and the by-invitation
meritocratic 'core' group (I think this is close to the 'steering
committee' in our current draft) is the model that failed for NetBSD
and XFree86, with a particular pattern of poor or absent
accountability and lack of project vision.

Cheers,

Matthew