[python-committers] Council / board (Was: 1 week to Oct 1)

[Antoine Pitrou]

Hi,

Le 25/09/2018 à 12:14, Victor Stinner a écrit :
> 
> Since there are no concrete PEPs, I don't know where I should post my
> comments. I decided to send them here :-)
> 
> For the new council/board idea (group of 3 or 5 peoples):
> 
> * Can we require that each people comes from a different company? At
> least, require that no all of them work for the same company. I would
> mean that a member of this council would have to nominate someone else
> if they decide to move to a different company which already has ("too
> many") council members.

The details must be ironed out, but that sounds like a good idea.  There
were routinely concerns about <come company> influencing the Python
development process.  Once it was Google, nowadays it seems to be Microsoft.

(admittedly, Google probably didn't influence us very much in the end,
but I'm not sure it's because we are immune to such a danger, rather
than Python simply not being an attractive target enough, as opposed to
e.g. Go or Javascript)

> * Mariatta proposed to require to have a least one woman in that
> council. What do you think of this idea? Honestly, I have no opinion
> yet, since I don't think this idea has been discussed enough yet. I
> would expect that only core developers could join the council and
> right now, there are 4 women core developers: Mariatta, Carol, Emily,
> Lisa.

Why stop at women?  There are many underrepresented groups.  You could
discriminate based on gender, skin colour, nationality, socio-economic
origins, etc.

The main problem, though, is we are talking about a very little group
chosen amongst a likely very small number of candidates (I don't expect
more than a dozen candidates, two dozens at most).  If you start doing
positive discrimination amongst such a small number of people, you
disrupt the democratic process (by which I mean voting) a *lot*.

Regards

Antoine.