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Create 0001-mission-statement.md #1

Closed rkingsbury closed 1 year ago

rkingsbury commented 1 year ago

Materials Project Software Foundation mission statement

jmmshn commented 1 year ago

@rkingsbury can you post a link to the Chan-Zuck paper?

JaGeo commented 1 year ago

@jmmshn https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010627 I still had it open.

JaGeo commented 1 year ago

To include the DEI components in our statement: could we add inclusive somewhow? I am not sure "inclusive governance" would completely caputure it but maybe we can add it to the "community-driven" part as in "inclusive community"? As English is my second language, I am very open to different suggestions.

rkingsbury commented 1 year ago

What about

community-driven, inclusive, coordinated, transparent, and accountable governance

JaGeo commented 1 year ago

Fine from my side. I was just not completely sure whether this would imply that we are working towards an inclusive community.

shyuep commented 1 year ago

Fine with me. I agree with @JaGeo that I have no idea what inclusive means in this context. We don't select our community - they basically volunteer their PRs and Issue Reports. In most instances, we do not even know the real identity of our contributors.

rkingsbury commented 1 year ago

Fine from my side. I was just not completely sure whether this would imply that we are working towards an inclusive community.

Fine with me. I agree with @JaGeo that I have no idea what inclusive means in this context. We don't select our community - they basically volunteer their PRs and Issue Reports. In most instances, we do not even know the real identity of our contributors.

To me, in this context inclusive has two dimensions. First, we seek a process whereby any of our contributors / community members (as opposed to only a closed or opaque small group) have an opportunity to see and provide feedback on our decisions if they choose, and second, that we take intentional steps to make sure our meetings, discussions, and tools are accessible, welcoming and respectful to contributors regardless of background.

What do y'all think? Is it helpful to be explicit about some of these points?

JaGeo commented 1 year ago

Yes, I think we should definitely be more explicit about each of the points (e.g., what do we mean by inclusive, what do we mean by community-driven and so on). As someone suggested in yesterday's meeting, maybe this is then the next step after having this sort of short summary of our mission.

I also agree that "inclusive" should refer to both of the points that you @rkingsbury mentioned.

rkingsbury commented 1 year ago

I typically think of mission statements as succinct, high-level statements of purpose for an organization. However it sounds like it's important to go a step further and explicitly clarify what we mean by "inclusive". This also suggests to me that we should explicitly clarify the other goals like "community-driven", "accountable", "transparent", and "coordinated"

To that end, I propose we keep the current mission statement as the first paragraph, then add 1-2 sentences below it to elaborate the meaning of each objective. I've updated the PR with a draft, which I'm copying below. @JaGeo - note that I absorbed one of the inclusive points into "transparent", but they are both there.

The mission of the Materials Project Software Foundation is to provide community-driven, inclusive, coordinated, transparent, and accountable governance of select public-facing and open-source Materials Project software packages.

We seek to be community-driven by considering the needs of a broad cross-section of our users when making development decisions.

We seek to be inclusive by taking intentional steps to make our meetings, discussions, and tools accessible, welcoming and respectful to contributors regardless of background.

We seek to be coordinated by promoting consistency and mutual compatibility among our codes, documentation, and training materials.

We seek to be transparent by publicly documenting major development decisions and providing opportunities for community members to give feedback on them.

We seek to be accountable by empowering Foundation members or users to alert us if they feel a development decision or misconduct within the community is undermining this mission.