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The Conda & Conda-Incubator Governance Policy
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Governance Finalization #51

Closed tnabtaf closed 2 years ago

tnabtaf commented 2 years ago

Hello all,

This pull requests implements the proposals described in Issue 47.

There are three major updates in this PR:

This update basically reiterates the earlier proposals, but in the actual governance document.

What next?

Steering Council Review and Feedback

Please add your feedback here, or on the next coda conference call. We will adjust the proposal accordingly.

Determine who will be on the updated Steering Council

Item # 4 in the proposed transition plan is:

4. Set up transition from current Steering Council

Our current Steering Council membership exceeds the shared funding thresholds in this proposal.

A proposal:

  1. To comply with the new limits, the vote to approve the new voting and membership model should also be a vote on what the initial membership of the revised council should be, once the new limits are applied. The new rules, and the revised council membership will happen simultaneously.
  2. We will need to know the funders of every candidate for the revised council before we vote on the proposal
  3. Currently, Anaconda, Quansight, and Voltron Data each fund more than the proposed maximum number of allowed council members (max: 2). We suggest that each block of members with common funding decide amongst themselves who will be on the revised Steering Council. We strongly suggest that anyone who drops from the Steering Council continue to be actively involved in community discussions and calls, and if you aren't already, join any conda or conda-incubator teams you are interested in.

To be clear, everyone on the current council will be eligible to vote on the rules change and the suggested revised Council membership.

These three groups will need to determine who their 2 representatives will be.

Remaining members document their significant funders

This should go into a new column in the steering.csv file.

Vote!

The Steering Council votes on the revised proposal.

Deploy

If the changes are approved, the governance document will be moved from the conda-incubator GitHub organization to the conda GitHub organization. Files in conda-incubator will be updated to point to conda.

beckermr commented 2 years ago

Ok @tnabtaf @conda-incubator/steering I have pushed some additional changes to the PR as commit https://github.com/conda-incubator/governance/pull/51/commits/e7a35ce655874be3d043889aa28a25df188f0fd9.

These changes do a few things:

  1. They add specific policies for various appeals, membership removal, etc. actions.
  2. Emeritus members can no longer vote.
  3. Community projects can remove contributors via a simple majority vote.
  4. Specification projects have been removed in favor of CEPS.
  5. Steering council members no longer have commit rights to all community projects. They instead have to apply like everyone else.

The change in the status of emeritus members was motivated by the new specific council maximum membership size. This size was made to constrain voting powers and having emeritus members vote breaks that.

beckermr commented 2 years ago

Looking at this more I may want to reconsider allowing the steering council to remove emeritus members.

beckermr commented 2 years ago

Definitely looking for comments on this.

ocefpaf commented 2 years ago

Definitely looking for comments on this.

You mean on https://github.com/conda-incubator/governance/pull/51#issuecomment-1159576327? If so, I'm not OK with us removing folks just b/c they are emeritus and some x amount of time passed. I'm OK with us asking them, from time to time, if they still want to remain emeritus or if they want to be removed.

beckermr commented 2 years ago

Sounds good @ocefpaf. I'll push a change to remove that. Thanks for the feedback!

beckermr commented 2 years ago

done @ocefpaf!

jezdez commented 2 years ago

@beckermr @ocefpaf That makes me wonder if it'd be worthwhile to define an annual review cycle for emeritus members in the policy, so it doesn't become a task nobody actually feels responsible for doing? I think so far @beckermr has done this and I'd like to remove the number of uncomfortable things he has on his plate.

tnabtaf commented 2 years ago

@beckermr Thanks for the policy (and typo - sorry!) updates.

tnabtaf commented 2 years ago

All, I think this might be ready for discussion on today's call...

jezdez commented 2 years ago

@conda-incubator/steering

This PR falls under the "Modifying the governance document" policy of the conda governance policy, please vote and/or comment on this PR.

This PR needs 75% of the Steering Council to vote yea to pass.

Note: The vote is for TWO items at once to reduce voting overhead.

The following two proposals are voted on:

  1. This pull request to implement an update to the conda & conda-incubator governance policy as described in #47 (see this pull request's content for more details).

  2. The "Fiscal Sponsorship Proposal" documented in https://github.com/conda-incubator/governance/issues/54.

To vote for both, please leave Approve (yea) or Request Changes (nay) pull request reviews.

If you would like changes to the current language, please leave a comment (in the governance policy PR or fiscal sponsorship issue) or push to this branch.

This vote will end on 2022-07-20.

tnabtaf commented 2 years ago

@CJ-Wright and @awwad: Thanks for all the feedback and for thinking implications through.

In most cases I have added suggested text. I also asked for text in at least one case.

I think there was only one place where I had a hard disagreement, and that was about provisional seats belonging to a company. I think they belong to a specific person from a company.

CJ wrote:

In my opinion this document lacks the requisite specificity in some areas, enforcement mechanisms on some of its rules and generally seems to be missing a consideration of the complex economic incentive structures that it will create.

I think I have addressed this. Please let me know what you think of the suggested text. (The first version reflects my interest in brevity. I suspect that there is an inverse relationship between the length of a governance document, and the number of people who understand it. However, lack of clarity eventually causes problem.)

While I appreciate the motivating situation driving this radical restructure of our governance I think this will only make matters more difficult to track. I am concerned that this will actively push away would be contributors as their actions could have vast implications for their organizations.

This is a hard objection to the basic proposal. I fear that we will not be able to address this objection and still achieve the stated goals.

This proposal does make things more complicated, and it does make it harder for some people to have a vote. I can't argue with either of those points. I think these are the costs of preventing capture.

It would be great to hear other options for achieving this. I suspect they all involve tradeoffs. Which tradeoffs do we want to make?

Thanks CJ and Seb, Dave C

dharhas commented 2 years ago

Reading through the governance changes, one of the immediate impacts is that Quansight will need to drop two folks from the steering council since we would have 4 ppl. Travis, myself, Jaime & Gonzalo. What would the actual procedure be for that. Would we be moved to the emeritus list?

beckermr commented 2 years ago

Yes, you would move to emeritus. We'd leave it up to you all to figure it out.

beckermr commented 2 years ago

@conda-incubator/steering please vote here!

beckermr commented 2 years ago

@conda-incubator/steering Please remember to read and vote on this proposal!

jezdez commented 2 years ago

@beckermr @CJ-Wright @awwad @chenghlee @msarahan @xhochy @dharhas @ocefpaf @jaimergp @mcg1969 @goanpeca @marcelotrevisani Please note the changes that have happened since you've voted -- after feedback from other council members. Given the sensitivity of this proposal, I encourage everyone to read them. Your initial vote will apply unless you record a new one.

beckermr commented 2 years ago

@conda-incubator/steering please look at this PR and vote!

beckermr commented 2 years ago

@conda-incubator/steering today is the last day to vote on this proposal

teoliphant commented 2 years ago

I don't see how to approve this, but I approve. I would like to see the steering council size change to min of 3 and max of 9 but that can be discussed later. I generally believe steering councils should be smaller and sub-committees and participation larger. I could also see changing the max of 2 from each funder to a percentage maximum that the steering council can be composed of from a single funding source (i.e. 1/3 is the maximum or something like that) -- rather than a hard limit on the number of people.

teoliphant commented 2 years ago

This is very exciting to see the tremendous amount of work that has gone into this process. This is very promising for the future of the conda organization.

jezdez commented 2 years ago

Voting results

The vote is over on this governance update proposal.

Among Steering Council members there are 20 "yes", 1 "no", and no abstentions.

This vote has reached quorum (21 is at least 75% of 22).

It has also passed since it recorded 20 "yes" votes and 1 "no" vote giving 20/21 which is greater than 75% of 21.

tnabtaf commented 2 years ago

Hi All,

I will be back at work next week, and I will start haranguing current members to document their funding, and for certain blocks to decide on who will stay on the steering council when a funder has too many representatives.

After that I will create PRs to move the governance documents from conda-incubator to conda.