[SciPy-Dev] SciPy governance model

[Nathaniel Smith]

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.

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.

-n

[1] http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#social-infrastructure
[2] http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

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