Governance Model

[briannapagan]

Most of these initial sketchings are based on concepts from https://www.theopensourceway.org/ and previous conversations at the bi-weekly pangeo-forge meeting. Myself, @yuvipanda and @cisaacstern will have a meeting today to discuss the following.

Selecting a Governance Model

From reading through the above ebook and starting to research into similar organizations, I believe the following governance models can all be contenders for moving pangeo-forge forward.

• Do-ocracy: forgoing formal and elaborate governance conventions and instead insist that "decisions are made by those who do the work". -- Pros: Since we will likely me interfacing with various large companies/government entities which produce geospatial data archives, the do-ocracy could "force" those to actively participate -- Cons: Not sure implementing this style would actually work, could cause the larger entities to just not participate. Or only allow entities with time/money capacities to dominate what is done

• Self-appointed council or board: "Under this model, members of an open source project may appoint a number of leadership groups to govern various aspects of a project. Such groups may have names like "steering committee," "committer council," "technical operating committee, "architecture council," or "board of directors." And typically, these groups construct their own decision-making conventions and succession procedures." -- Pros: "The self-appointing council or board governance model is useful in cases where a project does not have a sponsoring foundation and establishing electoral mechanisms is prohibitively difficult." --Cons: "this model can stymie community participation in leadership activities, as community members often feel like they must "wait to be chosen" before they can take initiative on work that interests them." Can also be issues if governing group is not representative of the community.

• Electoral: "Under the electoral model, communities establish and document electoral procedures to which they all agree, then enact those procedures as a regular matter of decision-making." -- Pros: more explicit documentation and definitions of roles, procedures and participation guidelines. -- Cons: Can be contentious, time-consuming and too complicated for the size of participation we current see.

• Foundation-backed: Either chose to be managed by an incorporated NGO, or form one ourselves. Some initial discussions started with this idea, potentially involving the Radiant Earth Foundation or 2i2c -- Pros: Allows the pangeo-forge project to be effectively an abstract entity from a foundation which can more easily take ownership of resources, planning etc. -- Cons: Legal requirements especially when we talk about funding. High amount of overhead.

Defining roles

• Members: how do we define this? Are users of pangeo-forge automatically project members? Are companies members or individuals? Are end-users members? Defining members means defining who it is the project leaders need to listen to.
• Contributors: what makes someone a contributor? Only contributors who push code? Does this apply to companies or individual people? What about non-coding type roles like advocacy or coordination?
• Leaders: The process of how we select leaders must be documents and made transparent

Integration into the pangeo community

What will this look like? Who can we reach out to? Get @rabernat feedback.

Open to-dos:

• [ ] Organize communication outside of currently private slack channel. Options include gitter... others? (@briannapagan)
• [ ] Select governance, how do we do this fairly and transparently (All)
• [ ] Engage in conversations with pangeo community leaders to see how pangeo-forge could be integrated into existing structure (@briannapagan)

[rabernat]

Edited my comment because I thought that this was about geozarr! 🙃 Please disregard.

[cisaacstern]

For reference: https://github.com/pangeo-data/governance

[cisaacstern]

Another reference; see Governance item on Coordination meeting minutes from 2023-01-02:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/14FpI9vaM6TeFtmM7LP9o_d5DZaYKgQVTTzT7tFRt-Nw/edit#heading=h.gloldb3y96y7

[briannapagan]

Notes from discussion on January 24th

• Refactoring pangeo model to include pangeo-forge

• Self-appoint and we attach pangeo-forge to the pangeo model

• Not something that should be owned by foundation, how to pay people is orthogonal. Let's focus on governance. This will be a sub-community of pangeo, follow their upstream code of conduct.

• We need to fully understand what this means

• pangeo-forge is software, pangeo is a community

• Preferring using the idea of a core team

• What needs to be documented? We need a name (pangeo-forge Core Team), a list of responsibilities, what are optional versus required, what are the roles, how do you gain entry, also documentation on how to exit (emeritus), roles could be defining roadmap and priorities, setting up plans -- we need a request for change structure -- quarterly roadmap priorities, this entity is the group you would make requests to, the group decides -- core team is by individual not by entity -- defining a number of seats on the team

• [ ] @briannapagan to mock up definitions of core team members versus contributors, what are the responsibilities

• one role idea, agile integration, a role Brianna can take on

• Taking NASA work, as a use case would help us figure out how to properly structure this organizationally

[cisaacstern]

Another reference point, recent blog about Jupyter governance:

https://blog.jupyter.org/announcing-a-new-jupyter-governance-model-and-our-first-executive-council-39b3989dc064

(via https://twitter.com/Ruv7/status/1617985058375348224?s=20&t=8YyWlcLIBhnIUo4YoQYn1A)

[briannapagan]

Thank you @cisaacstern for all the useful references!

Here are my suggested definitions. For Core Team members we effectively adopt the definition/processes of how Steering Council membership is set-up in pangeo: https://github.com/pangeo-data/governance/blob/master/governance.md#the-steering-council

For Core Team contributors I suggest we adopt the definition/processes of Distinguished Contributors from jupyter: https://jupyter.org/governance/distinguished_contributors.html

Will discuss at bi-weekly pangeo-forge meeting today.

[briannapagan]

Huddle on February 15th with @yuvipanda and @cisaacstern.

• are we running a web service after the grant? If so, is the web service governed by this same org?

• Suggestion to split up the web service aspect, some things would stop working after NSF grant is done. Separating this out now would be helpful. Details of how to split this up needs follow-up.

• Distinguish the ability to deploy recipes off of github different than specific storage target. After NSF grant the ability for anyone to use the shared resources from the NSF grant.

• A user integration on github is a core part of the full picture. What will be done at end of the grant is an obvious way to use the integration for free.

• Need to physically separate the repos

• [ ] Brianna will submit a PR with the two definitions above.