Establishing cross project monthy communication mechanism

[ellisonbg]

Hi everyone. Today we had an active governance office hours today with myself @fperez @jasongrout @afshin @willingc @Zsailer @tgeorgeux in attendance. One of the topics that @willingc brought up was the challenge of cross org/repo communications. Jupyter is a vast project now, and it can be nearly impossible for any individual to follow everything that is going on. Communication around governance is one part of this, but it impacts all work on the project.

In the conversation, an idea began to emerge about establishing a lightweight mechanism to enable the Jupyter community to follow what is going on across our orgs, repos, and working groups on monthy basis. Here is the rough sketch (please help us iterate on this):

• Create a GitHub repo for collection and presentation of monthly update information (see below for more details about what type of information we are thinking about).
  • We talked about reusing our existing jupyter/newsletter for this, but maybe another makes more sense?
  • Publish the relevant markdown docs in this repo using GitHub pages.
• Have each GitHub organization under the Jupyter umbrella (see question 1 below) appoint a communications person that would own the collection of the monthly information for that org.
  • That person could work with contributors on that org however they see fit to collect the information. For example, on a big org, they could delegate other people who provide information for individual repos.
• Once a month, the communications person would:
  • Work with the org-level contributors to collect the information.
  • Submit a PR to the appropriate markdown document on the central repo.
• What type of information?
  • We want the information to be easy to write, collect and publish–in the form of bullet points in complete-ish sentences with a link.
  • Under the broader umbrella of "what interesting work is going on?", bullet points should address the following types of questions:
  • What work has the org/repo done over the last month?
  • What releases have the org/repo made over the last month?
  • What work is happening over the next month?
  • Big questions or challenges the org/repo is wrestling with, especially those with cross project impact?
  • What ongoing meetings is the org/repo having that others can attend.

Questions:

• For this purpose, do we want to include "adjacent" open source project that are not formally under Jupyter's governance (model QuantStack, nteract, etc.)?
• @Zsailer may be willing to help us get this started as the coordinator. It would be helpful to have others help in this - maybe the communications person for the orgs can rotate monthly?
• Should the non-GitHub working groups (governance, inclusion and diversity, jupyter community workshops, jupytercon, etc.) also report (I don't see why not)?
• What repo should we use?
• What are the monthly dates for reminders, the PR submission, etc.
• How should we organize the markdown documents into folders across dates and project areas?

[lresende]

Just my 0.2 cents, prior to working on Jupyter I have been working at Apache projects for a little while (over 10 years)... Apache had similar issues, around growth and community/project oversight, and they have in place a great structure that has been working for a while, enabling board oversight while still giving the projects autonomy to govern themselves.

Making a parallel to Jupyter community:

• Project communities (Jupyter Org) provide reports due a week before the monthly meeting (see bottom of the minutes for project reports)
• Monthly public Jupyter Steering Council meetings review and provide feedback to the project/communities.
• All then is available in minutes and can be observed by the overall community.

Based on that, it could also help shape the relationship between Jupyter (umbrella organization) and it projects (Jupyter related project organizations) where each org has a project management committee (probably the core contributors) that are responsible for governing the org and reporting/summarizing back to the council.

[jasongrout]

I'm happy to help with this, and I'm happy to be a point person for JupyterLab and/or ipywidgets if needed.

[choldgraf]

In general I think that this is a great idea - my main concern about this is around the extra labor we'll create for the people that are sitting on this meeting. In my experience, wrangling information from people can be stressful and a lot of work in volunteer organizations, especially under-resourced ones.

Some quick thoughts for your questions:

• For this purpose, do we want to include "adjacent" open source project that are not formally under Jupyter's governance (model QuantStack, nteract, etc.)?
  • IMO any project that is primarily building tools in the jupyter space and interested/willing to follow the communication model that the community agrees upon should be welcome to join.
• @Zsailer may be willing to help us get this started as the coordinator. It would be helpful to have others help in this - maybe the communications person for the orgs can rotate monthly?
  • This seems like a good idea, I am a fan of making this an explicit role that people fill. I feel like the rotation timeline should be left up to the sub-projects but suggestion of bi-monthly seems reasonable.
• Should the non-GitHub working groups (governance, inclusion and diversity, jupyter community workshops, jupytercon, etc.) also report (I don't see why not)?
  • IMO yes, this meeting isn't about diving into technical discussions, it's about giving a high-level info-sharing opportunity. (right?) Sharing information across the "non-coding" parts of the project seems important to me.
• What repo should we use?
  • Why not add to the jupyter/jupyter community docs repo? Alternatively we could make a jupyter-wide "team-compass" repo and add this as a sub-folder to it?
• How should we organize the markdown documents into folders across dates and project areas?
  • Arbitrary suggestion: have one markdown file per day, each file starts with a table that has the name of the orgs present in the doc, and a link to the section for that org. Could either be organized as a pure-github repository, or rendered as a website (happy to help with that, we could jupyter book if folks are interested, but other SSGs would work just fine as well).

[willingc]

@choldgraf Some context. My first suggestion to the group was to create a lightweight hackmd that could be edited within a timeframe and then posted where each org would share 3-5 bullets.

It's been difficult to highlight new accomplishments or cool new projects by the Project in my keynotes because there is no centralized way to do so. I'm less interested in detailed updates and more interested in key accomplishments and what is currently being worked on that folks are excited about.

[choldgraf]

@willingc I totally agree that this information would be quite valuable to have. I like the idea of having checkpoints w/ low-maintenance burden to informally set a cadence of releases / reflection / etc. It'd also make it easier to do things like write annual updates from projects or write grants etc.

[lresende]

Maybe I misunderstood the initial issue, as I was thinking more about the governance aspect of the multiple projects. This does sound much more like a periodical newsletter where different projects provide a community update, more towards advertising or bringing something up for discussion.

How about collecting the info in someplace (shared dropbox, HackMD, etc) and just using the Jupyter Community Forum to publish? I would maybe avoid using GitHub, as I am foreseeing everybody coming on the last couple days and providing a ton of update (prs) and there is going to be a lot of possible merge conflicts to deal with.

Having said that, then I don't think we should include governance-related items on these newsletters (the original issue did mention some items that might be more towards governance such as issues/challenges).

And yes, non-GitHub projects and initiatives should report as well.

[willingc]

@choldgraf What if we had a topic on the Discourse Forum, as @lresende mentions, that is titled Project News or Announcements where there could be a pinned post for each org (or affiliated project).

[choldgraf]

I think this could be a nice way to get around the extra burden of pull/modify/commit/PR that would come with a git repository. We could create a thread in the forum that people can reply to with updates, or create a single "wiki-style" thread that people can edit. Maybe put it in the community section?

[ellisonbg]

There are a couple of layers here that have slightly different needs:

1. The people writing/collecting the bullet points within a specific org. For these people, I agree this should be as lightweight, quick, and collaborative as possible - hackmd is a great option for this part. At the same time, I am fine leaving it entirely up to each org to decide how the bullet points are written and collected (standardizing on markdown is probably a good idea).
   2. Aggregation across different orgs–this is where the central coordinator comes in. If each org is authoring/collecting and given the central coordinator markdown, the tool for that collection can also be flexible. It could be a master hackmd file, a markdown document on a repo. I imagine a small amount of grouping into sections, etc. will be needed, but the hard point won't be the editing as much as the cat herding.
   3. How to publish the information. The group who consumes this information will be much broader than the core folks helping to collect the information, so I think this should be as broad a venue as possible. Possibilities include discourse, githhub pages, jupyter blog. An issue we are already running into with posting governance meeting minutes on discourse is that the information is not very discoverable.
   4. Archiving. I think it makes sense for this information to be archived in an appropriate manner. For markdown, GitHub seems to be a good option.

On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 1:15 PM Chris Holdgraf notifications@github.com wrote:

I think this could be a nice way to get around the extra burden of pull/modify/commit/PR that would come with a git repository. We could create a thread in the forum that people can reply to with updates, or create a single "wiki-style" thread that people can edit. Maybe put it in the community section?

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

-- Brian E. Granger

Principal Technical Program Manager, AWS AI Platform (brgrange@amazon.com) On Leave - Professor of Physics and Data Science, Cal Poly @ellisonbg on GitHub

[choldgraf]

re: quick bullet points, I've been using a little mini-CLI tool I wrote for grabbing GitHub activity information. I just packaged it up in case others would find it useful for this kind of thing: https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/a-tool-for-quickly-generate-markdown-summaries-of-github-activity/2248

for aggregation and archiving, it's one reason I like Discourse - the aggregation step could be "post in this community forum thread" and then it's already archived and searchable. Then you could just maintain an index page somewhere that links out to each of these updates. We've done this a few times in the Binder docs and I think it's a nice balance of ease-of-use and flexibility.

[lresende]

So, we have this guy Tony Hist that has been doing a good job on a monthly newsletter around Jupyter News. Maybe we could reach out to him and try to help him expand his efforts with more content and more easily discoverable? See this thread.

Having said that, and being a little naive, I would love to be able to see on these newsletters opportunities to come and help collaborate on the community, so it's not about new functionality, but maybe things like we are starting the new effort on feature blah, and we have meetings every week at 9 AM PST for the interested parties or things like Meetups, upcoming talks from contributors/community members.

[willingc]

Tony Hirst's newsletter is awesome @lresende and a wonderful asset to our community.

Personally, what I was looking for are high level important accomplishments or things being worked on for release in 3 months or so, specifically on Jupyter projects.

[Ruv7]

One of the things we'd talked about as a part of the wider conversations on governance is the importance of recognizing significant/ongoing contributions. It's a bit of a tangent on the original question posed here but as we brainstorm ideas around structures and roles such as the one being discussed here of a communications person I want to add this into the conversation. I ran into a Jupyter evangelist yesterday who asked us to do something like the Docker Captain program. https://www.docker.com/blog/inside-look-docker-captains-program - and I think it's brilliant. Fitting in with the design concept created over the summer for the Jupyter website: (scroll to bottom to see design mock) something space related for the title would be fun. Jupyter Mission Specialist? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut_ranks_and_positions

[blink1073]

It might be my military bias, but I like Jupyter Captain better. ;). It might also read better on a resume. Mission Commander implies a single mission to me. Either way, this sounds like a fantastic program to emulate for our community, thanks Ana!

Regards,

Steve

Sent from Phone

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From: Ana Ruvalcaba notifications@github.com Sent: Friday, October 4, 2019 1:57 PM To: jupyter/governance Cc: Subscribed Subject: Re: [jupyter/governance] Establishing cross project monthy communication mechanism (#67)

One of the things we'd talked about as a part of the wider conversations on governance is the importance of recognizing significant/ongoing contributions. It's a bit of a tangent on the original question posed here but as we brainstorm ideas around structures and roles such as the one being discussed here of a communications person I want to add this into the conversation. I ran into a Jupyter evangelist yesterday who asked us to do something like the Docker Captain program. https://www.docker.com/blog/inside-look-docker-captains-program - and I think it's brilliant. Fitting in with the design concept created over the summer for the Jupyter websitehttps://github.com/jupyter/jupyter.github.io/issues/331: (scroll to bottom to see design mock) something space related for the title would be fun. Jupyter Mission Specialist? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut_ranks_and_positions

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