[python-committers] Organizing an informational PEP on project governance options (was Re: Transfer of power)

2018-07-13 Thread Nathaniel Smith
On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 6:35 PM, Łukasz Langa  wrote:
> I'm +1 to an Informational PEP around the state of the art in project 
> governance.

I think this is a great idea. There's a lot of experience out there on
different governance models, but of course any given project only uses
one of them, so knowledge about what works and what doesn't is pretty
fragmented across the F/OSS community. And this is a really important
decision for us and our users, so we should do due diligence. For
example, we should think this through at least as carefully as we
thought through Github vs. Gitlab :-). A PEP is a good format to start
doing that.

I volunteer to co-author such a PEP. But I'm not up to doing it on my
own. So... who else wants to be a co-author? (I'm not going to
pressure anyone, but Brett, Mariatta, and Carol, please know that your
names were the first ones that jumped to my mind when thinking about
this :-).)

What I'm thinking:

- While this might eventually produce some recommendations, the
immediate goal would just be to collect together different options and
ideas and point out their trade-offs. I'm guessing most core devs
aren't interested in becoming experts on open-source governance, so
the goal here would be to help the broader community get up to speed
and have a more informed discussion [1].

- As per the general PEP philosophy, I think this is best done by
having some amount of general discussion on
python-dev/python-committers, plus a small group of coauthors (say 2-4
people) who take responsibility for filtering ideas and organizing
them in a coherent document.

- Places where we'll want to look for ideas:
  - The thread already happening on python-committers
  - Whatever books / articles / blog posts / etc. we can find (e.g. I
know Karl Fogel's Producing OSS book has some good discussion)
  - Other major projects in a similar position to CPython (e.g.,
node.js, Rust) -- what do they do, and what parts are they
happy/not-happy about?
  - Large Python projects (e.g. Django) -- likewise

If you have suggestions for particularly interesting projects or
excellent writing on the topic, then this thread would be a good place
to mention them.

-n

[1] The NumPy project has put a lot of energy into working through
governance issues over the last few years, and one thing that
definitely helped was coming up with some "assigned reading" ahead of
the main sprint where we talked about this. NumPy's problems are/were
pretty different from CPython's, but I'm imagining this PEP as filling
a similar role.

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
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Re: [python-committers] Organizing an informational PEP on project governance options (was Re: Transfer of power)

2018-07-13 Thread Antoine Pitrou

Le 13/07/2018 à 13:31, Nathaniel Smith a écrit :
> 
> I volunteer to co-author such a PEP. But I'm not up to doing it on my
> own. So... who else wants to be a co-author? (I'm not going to
> pressure anyone, but Brett, Mariatta, and Carol, please know that your
> names were the first ones that jumped to my mind when thinking about
> this :-).)

I don't know how much time I'll be able to devote to it, but feel free
to enlist me.

> If you have suggestions for particularly interesting projects or
> excellent writing on the topic, then this thread would be a good place
> to mention them.

Perhaps Apache httpd? (or some other major Apache project, since I
/think/ they share similar governance structures... I happen to work on
Apache Arrow, which is young and a bit on the small side compared to
Python, but can ask the project leaders for feedback)

Regards

Antoine.


> 
> What I'm thinking:
> 
> - While this might eventually produce some recommendations, the
> immediate goal would just be to collect together different options and
> ideas and point out their trade-offs. I'm guessing most core devs
> aren't interested in becoming experts on open-source governance, so
> the goal here would be to help the broader community get up to speed
> and have a more informed discussion [1].
> 
> - As per the general PEP philosophy, I think this is best done by
> having some amount of general discussion on
> python-dev/python-committers, plus a small group of coauthors (say 2-4
> people) who take responsibility for filtering ideas and organizing
> them in a coherent document.
> 
> - Places where we'll want to look for ideas:
>   - The thread already happening on python-committers
>   - Whatever books / articles / blog posts / etc. we can find (e.g. I
> know Karl Fogel's Producing OSS book has some good discussion)
>   - Other major projects in a similar position to CPython (e.g.,
> node.js, Rust) -- what do they do, and what parts are they
> happy/not-happy about?
>   - Large Python projects (e.g. Django) -- likewise
> 
> 
> -n
> 
> [1] The NumPy project has put a lot of energy into working through
> governance issues over the last few years, and one thing that
> definitely helped was coming up with some "assigned reading" ahead of
> the main sprint where we talked about this. NumPy's problems are/were
> pretty different from CPython's, but I'm imagining this PEP as filling
> a similar role.
> 
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Re: [python-committers] Organizing an informational PEP on project governance options (was Re: Transfer of power)

2018-07-13 Thread Doug Hellmann
Excerpts from Nathaniel Smith's message of 2018-07-13 04:31:00 -0700:
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 6:35 PM, Łukasz Langa  wrote:
> > I'm +1 to an Informational PEP around the state of the art in project 
> > governance.
> 
> I think this is a great idea. There's a lot of experience out there on
> different governance models, but of course any given project only uses
> one of them, so knowledge about what works and what doesn't is pretty
> fragmented across the F/OSS community. And this is a really important
> decision for us and our users, so we should do due diligence. For
> example, we should think this through at least as carefully as we
> thought through Github vs. Gitlab :-). A PEP is a good format to start
> doing that.
> 
> I volunteer to co-author such a PEP. But I'm not up to doing it on my
> own. So... who else wants to be a co-author? (I'm not going to
> pressure anyone, but Brett, Mariatta, and Carol, please know that your
> names were the first ones that jumped to my mind when thinking about
> this :-).)
> 
> What I'm thinking:
> 
> - While this might eventually produce some recommendations, the
> immediate goal would just be to collect together different options and
> ideas and point out their trade-offs. I'm guessing most core devs
> aren't interested in becoming experts on open-source governance, so
> the goal here would be to help the broader community get up to speed
> and have a more informed discussion [1].
> 
> - As per the general PEP philosophy, I think this is best done by
> having some amount of general discussion on
> python-dev/python-committers, plus a small group of coauthors (say 2-4
> people) who take responsibility for filtering ideas and organizing
> them in a coherent document.
> 
> - Places where we'll want to look for ideas:
>   - The thread already happening on python-committers
>   - Whatever books / articles / blog posts / etc. we can find (e.g. I
> know Karl Fogel's Producing OSS book has some good discussion)
>   - Other major projects in a similar position to CPython (e.g.,
> node.js, Rust) -- what do they do, and what parts are they
> happy/not-happy about?
>   - Large Python projects (e.g. Django) -- likewise
> 
> If you have suggestions for particularly interesting projects or
> excellent writing on the topic, then this thread would be a good place
> to mention them.

I would be happy to contribute based on the experiences we've had
with different leadership models in OpenStack.

Doug

> 
> -n
> 
> [1] The NumPy project has put a lot of energy into working through
> governance issues over the last few years, and one thing that
> definitely helped was coming up with some "assigned reading" ahead of
> the main sprint where we talked about this. NumPy's problems are/were
> pretty different from CPython's, but I'm imagining this PEP as filling
> a similar role.
> 
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Re: [python-committers] Organizing an informational PEP on project governance options (was Re: Transfer of power)

2018-07-13 Thread Brett Cannon
On Fri, 13 Jul 2018 at 04:31 Nathaniel Smith  wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 6:35 PM, Łukasz Langa  wrote:
> > I'm +1 to an Informational PEP around the state of the art in project
> governance.
>
> I think this is a great idea. There's a lot of experience out there on
> different governance models, but of course any given project only uses
> one of them, so knowledge about what works and what doesn't is pretty
> fragmented across the F/OSS community. And this is a really important
> decision for us and our users, so we should do due diligence. For
> example, we should think this through at least as carefully as we
> thought through Github vs. Gitlab :-). A PEP is a good format to start
> doing that.
>
> I volunteer to co-author such a PEP. But I'm not up to doing it on my
> own. So... who else wants to be a co-author? (I'm not going to
> pressure anyone, but Brett, Mariatta, and Carol, please know that your
> names were the first ones that jumped to my mind when thinking about
> this :-).)
>

Thanks for thinking of me, but I actually already have a governance model
that I want to propose so I don't think I could be viewed as impartial when
gathering details on other approaches.



>
> What I'm thinking:
>
> - While this might eventually produce some recommendations, the
> immediate goal would just be to collect together different options and
> ideas and point out their trade-offs. I'm guessing most core devs
> aren't interested in becoming experts on open-source governance, so
> the goal here would be to help the broader community get up to speed
> and have a more informed discussion [1].
>
> - As per the general PEP philosophy, I think this is best done by
> having some amount of general discussion on
> python-dev/python-committers, plus a small group of coauthors (say 2-4
> people) who take responsibility for filtering ideas and organizing
> them in a coherent document.
>
> - Places where we'll want to look for ideas:
>   - The thread already happening on python-committers
>   - Whatever books / articles / blog posts / etc. we can find (e.g. I
> know Karl Fogel's Producing OSS book has some good discussion)
>   - Other major projects in a similar position to CPython (e.g.,
> node.js, Rust) -- what do they do, and what parts are they
> happy/not-happy about?
>   - Large Python projects (e.g. Django) -- likewise
>

So are you thinking an informational PEP that does a general survey of
other projects and how they handle things? If so then I think that would be
interesting to have even for other projects looking for this kind of
information.

My suspicion is when we all decide it's time to make a decision that we
will have a call for PEPs on governance models and then we will choose from
those. So in that situation I would view this initial PEP as information
gathering for those that want an idea of what preexisting approaches there
are before working towards a concrete proposal. That sounds about right?


>
> If you have suggestions for particularly interesting projects or
> excellent writing on the topic, then this thread would be a good place
> to mention them.
>

Someone privately suggested Kafka to me, but I think that's partially
because Kafka is apparently about to propose a release and the person
follows its development.

-Brett


>
> -n
>
> [1] The NumPy project has put a lot of energy into working through
> governance issues over the last few years, and one thing that
> definitely helped was coming up with some "assigned reading" ahead of
> the main sprint where we talked about this. NumPy's problems are/were
> pretty different from CPython's, but I'm imagining this PEP as filling
> a similar role.
>
> --
> Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
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Re: [python-committers] Organizing an informational PEP on project governance options (was Re: Transfer of power)

2018-07-13 Thread Barry Warsaw
On Jul 13, 2018, at 04:31, Nathaniel Smith  wrote:
> 
> I volunteer to co-author such a PEP. But I'm not up to doing it on my
> own. So... who else wants to be a co-author? (I'm not going to
> pressure anyone, but Brett, Mariatta, and Carol, please know that your
> names were the first ones that jumped to my mind when thinking about
> this :-).)

Count me in.

Procedurally, I think an informational PEP numbered in sequence is a good place 
for the “design” of our governance.  Once we’ve settled on a plan, we would 
capture the operational procedures in a new process PEP (I propose PEP 2), 
which would be our working document moving forward.  I think it’s pretty much a 
certainty that whatever we come up with initially will undergo changes as time 
goes on and we gain experience.  PEP 2 would then be the living document for 
our language governance process.

-Barry



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Re: [python-committers] Organizing an informational PEP on project governance options (was Re: Transfer of power)

2018-07-13 Thread Carol Willing

> On Jul 13, 2018, at 5:15 PM, Barry Warsaw  wrote:
> 
> On Jul 13, 2018, at 04:31, Nathaniel Smith  wrote:
>> 
>> I volunteer to co-author such a PEP. But I'm not up to doing it on my
>> own. So... who else wants to be a co-author? (I'm not going to
>> pressure anyone, but Brett, Mariatta, and Carol, please know that your
>> names were the first ones that jumped to my mind when thinking about
>> this :-).)
> 
> Count me in.

Me too.

> 
> Procedurally, I think an informational PEP numbered in sequence is a good 
> place for the “design” of our governance.

I've been debating all day how to respond to this informational PEP re: 
governance. While I think it's great to cull good practices from other 
communities, I'm not sure that Python really fits into any existing governance 
that other projects use. IMHO Python is one of the healthiest 
language/community in the open source world. There's a reason that the saying 
"I came for the language and stayed for the community" exists.

There's also a reason the Zen of Python has been so popular for so long. It 
works.

While this may be an unconventional idea, I would love to look at governance 
through the lens of these 2 universally held beliefs as we begin to "design" 
our goverance (Thank you Barry for phrasing so well).

>  Once we’ve settled on a plan, we would capture the operational procedures in 
> a new process PEP (I propose PEP 2), which would be our working document 
> moving forward.  I think it’s pretty much a certainty that whatever we come 
> up with initially will undergo changes as time goes on and we gain 
> experience.  PEP 2 would then be the living document for our language 
> governance process.

Sounds great.


> 
> -Barry
> 

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Re: [python-committers] Organizing an informational PEP on project governance options (was Re: Transfer of power)

2018-08-01 Thread Nathaniel Smith
I'm sorry, I seem to have accidentally licked a cookie [1] here. I'm still
keen to see this happen and to be a part of it, and have been trying to be
find the spoons to take the lead on organizing, but it's been a few weeks
now and that hasn't happened yet [2].

Does anyone else want to take the lead here? A number of people have
expressed interest in helping or in making introductions to other
communities, and I think the next step would be to organize some kind of
kick off meeting to rough out an outline and start divvying up work.

-n

[1] http://communitymgt.wikia.com/wiki/Cookie_Licking
[2] not to go into too many details, but basically I'm currently sick,
unemployed, and broke, which isn't a crisis but sorting it out is sucking
up a lot of energy.

On Jul 13, 2018 04:31, "Nathaniel Smith"  wrote:

On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 6:35 PM, Łukasz Langa  wrote:
> I'm +1 to an Informational PEP around the state of the art in project
governance.

I think this is a great idea. There's a lot of experience out there on
different governance models, but of course any given project only uses
one of them, so knowledge about what works and what doesn't is pretty
fragmented across the F/OSS community. And this is a really important
decision for us and our users, so we should do due diligence. For
example, we should think this through at least as carefully as we
thought through Github vs. Gitlab :-). A PEP is a good format to start
doing that.

I volunteer to co-author such a PEP. But I'm not up to doing it on my
own. So... who else wants to be a co-author? (I'm not going to
pressure anyone, but Brett, Mariatta, and Carol, please know that your
names were the first ones that jumped to my mind when thinking about
this :-).)

What I'm thinking:

- While this might eventually produce some recommendations, the
immediate goal would just be to collect together different options and
ideas and point out their trade-offs. I'm guessing most core devs
aren't interested in becoming experts on open-source governance, so
the goal here would be to help the broader community get up to speed
and have a more informed discussion [1].

- As per the general PEP philosophy, I think this is best done by
having some amount of general discussion on
python-dev/python-committers, plus a small group of coauthors (say 2-4
people) who take responsibility for filtering ideas and organizing
them in a coherent document.

- Places where we'll want to look for ideas:
  - The thread already happening on python-committers
  - Whatever books / articles / blog posts / etc. we can find (e.g. I
know Karl Fogel's Producing OSS book has some good discussion)
  - Other major projects in a similar position to CPython (e.g.,
node.js, Rust) -- what do they do, and what parts are they
happy/not-happy about?
  - Large Python projects (e.g. Django) -- likewise

If you have suggestions for particularly interesting projects or
excellent writing on the topic, then this thread would be a good place
to mention them.

-n

[1] The NumPy project has put a lot of energy into working through
governance issues over the last few years, and one thing that
definitely helped was coming up with some "assigned reading" ahead of
the main sprint where we talked about this. NumPy's problems are/were
pretty different from CPython's, but I'm imagining this PEP as filling
a similar role.


-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
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Re: [python-committers] Organizing an informational PEP on project governance options (was Re: Transfer of power)

2018-08-08 Thread Mariatta Wijaya
Hi Nathaniel,

I know you mentioned my name earlier, and thanks for thinking of me. But
I'm really sorry, I just don't have the bandwidth to help out with this
right now.

Not sure if you've made any progress yet. Since the intention is to collect
information of the various governance models out there, I was thinking
perhaps you can ask non core developers to help out with this effort. So
that way you're not constrained by the limited number of core devs and
their limited free time available.

What do you think?

Mariatta


On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:17 PM Nathaniel Smith  wrote:

> I'm sorry, I seem to have accidentally licked a cookie [1] here. I'm still
> keen to see this happen and to be a part of it, and have been trying to be
> find the spoons to take the lead on organizing, but it's been a few weeks
> now and that hasn't happened yet [2].
>
> Does anyone else want to take the lead here? A number of people have
> expressed interest in helping or in making introductions to other
> communities, and I think the next step would be to organize some kind of
> kick off meeting to rough out an outline and start divvying up work.
>
> -n
>
> [1] http://communitymgt.wikia.com/wiki/Cookie_Licking
> [2] not to go into too many details, but basically I'm currently sick,
> unemployed, and broke, which isn't a crisis but sorting it out is sucking
> up a lot of energy.
>
> On Jul 13, 2018 04:31, "Nathaniel Smith"  wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 6:35 PM, Łukasz Langa  wrote:
> > I'm +1 to an Informational PEP around the state of the art in project
> governance.
>
> I think this is a great idea. There's a lot of experience out there on
> different governance models, but of course any given project only uses
> one of them, so knowledge about what works and what doesn't is pretty
> fragmented across the F/OSS community. And this is a really important
> decision for us and our users, so we should do due diligence. For
> example, we should think this through at least as carefully as we
> thought through Github vs. Gitlab :-). A PEP is a good format to start
> doing that.
>
> I volunteer to co-author such a PEP. But I'm not up to doing it on my
> own. So... who else wants to be a co-author? (I'm not going to
> pressure anyone, but Brett, Mariatta, and Carol, please know that your
> names were the first ones that jumped to my mind when thinking about
> this :-).)
>
> What I'm thinking:
>
> - While this might eventually produce some recommendations, the
> immediate goal would just be to collect together different options and
> ideas and point out their trade-offs. I'm guessing most core devs
> aren't interested in becoming experts on open-source governance, so
> the goal here would be to help the broader community get up to speed
> and have a more informed discussion [1].
>
> - As per the general PEP philosophy, I think this is best done by
> having some amount of general discussion on
> python-dev/python-committers, plus a small group of coauthors (say 2-4
> people) who take responsibility for filtering ideas and organizing
> them in a coherent document.
>
> - Places where we'll want to look for ideas:
>   - The thread already happening on python-committers
>   - Whatever books / articles / blog posts / etc. we can find (e.g. I
> know Karl Fogel's Producing OSS book has some good discussion)
>   - Other major projects in a similar position to CPython (e.g.,
> node.js, Rust) -- what do they do, and what parts are they
> happy/not-happy about?
>   - Large Python projects (e.g. Django) -- likewise
>
> If you have suggestions for particularly interesting projects or
> excellent writing on the topic, then this thread would be a good place
> to mention them.
>
> -n
>
> [1] The NumPy project has put a lot of energy into working through
> governance issues over the last few years, and one thing that
> definitely helped was coming up with some "assigned reading" ahead of
> the main sprint where we talked about this. NumPy's problems are/were
> pretty different from CPython's, but I'm imagining this PEP as filling
> a similar role.
>
>
> --
> Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
>
>
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