[SciPy-Dev] SciPy governance model

[Ralf Gommers]

Hi all,

Starting with the summary of my email of earlier today: I'd like to push on
with agreeing on a governance model and document.  We had some discussions
and a hangout on that last year [1].  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, 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.

We're now at a point where most other major projects in the scientific
Python ecosystem have a formal governance model.  Many are modeled after
the Jupyter one [2], which defines a BDFL, a steering council and
contributors, and a voting system to make decisions (simplified, there's
much more - the whole document is worth reading).  NumPy chose another
model, with a steering council and consensus-based decision making [3].
>From the outside, the Jupyter model seems to be working for them.  The
NumPy model hasn't been exercised too much yet, but should work well too.
There are variations on those two models in use as well (like the Jupyter
model minus the BDFL).

An email discussion on this topic without a concrete proposal or summary
document is likely to go on for a long time and may not converge easily.  A
video conference is also tricky, with dates/timezones and discussion often
going off on tangents.  So I have the following proposal:

- We start by drafting an extended summary of the various models and
getting a sense of which model the core team prefers.
- We then work out that model, and bring it back to this list for
discussion/finetuning/acceptance.
- "We" here is the group of people who indicate, on this list or to me
off-list, that they want to participate by the end of this week.

Thoughts? Volunteers?

Ralf

[1] https://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/2015-April/020636.html
[2] Jupyter governance doc: https://github.com/jupyter/governance
[3] NumPy governance doc:
http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-dev/dev/governance/index.html
[4] Producing Open Source software (Karl Fogel): http://producingoss.com/
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