[SciPy-Dev] SciPy governance model

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Sun, Sep 4, 2016 at 1:07 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I'm happy to help.   I have some time this coming week.  I know that
Stefan vdW is thinking hard about these issues at the moment for
scikit-image, so we may be able to collaborate with scikit-image on
some of these discussions.

The Jupyter (BDFL) model got picked up by at Pandas [1], and MPL [2].
The numpy model is designed for the situation where was not an obvious
candidate to be project leader.

So, I strongly suspect that our choice of model will come down to
whether we can agree on a project leader, or agree on a way to chose
one.  The obvious candidates would I guess be in this list:

git shortlog -ns --since "5 years ago" | head -5

  1789 Pauli Virtanen
  1528 Ralf Gommers
   770 Evgeni Burovski
   604 Alex Griffing
   402 Warren Weckesser

I have the impression that you (Ralf) and Pauli have also been the
most active in reviewing and merging pull requests over that time.

Can I humbly suggest that you 5 discuss amongst yourselves who among
you would like to be project leader?    If there's only one of you who
wants to do that job, then the decision process about governance is
much easier.  If there are several of you who want to do the job, it's
still easier, because we can just work out a voting process to select
you.   I think we should consider the numpy governance model, only if
there are none of you who want to be leader.

Thanks for bringing up the discussion,

Matthew




[1] https://github.com/pydata/pandas-governance
[2] https://github.com/matplotlib/governance/pull/1