Creating more open discussions of committee meetings

[aterrel]

As @ivanov has mentioned in the issue #5, the logging of issues is not sufficient to understand the trade offs that committees adjudicate. The desire for the NumFOCUS leadership to open up it's decision process has been discussed in several forums, but its not clear how exactly to do that. I propose we start moving to proposal via discussions for various committees and then the community is able to follow along without needing to be in each committee meeting.

Background

Current practice for committees is to have a charter (DISC, INFRA, ELECTION), closed meetings, and reports sent to the board of the directors quarterly. Some committees publish meeting notes via markdown, google docs, or other and manage work in different ways.

The current communication channels for NumFOCUS Staff to project from this private post, include

Via Email:

Main email address for non-finance questions - [email protected]
Main email address for finance questions - [email protected]
Sponsored projects google group - [email protected]
Infrastructure - [email protected]
NF Staff direct emails - [email protected] - if you ever have anything confidential you want to discuss.

Via Slack:

#projects
#general
#random
DMs directly to the person you would like to connect with if you ever have anything confidential you want to share.

Via GitHub:

Weekly Updates
We started in 2024 to provide projects with weekly updates on staff teams so they can stay up to date with all of our operational activities. Feel free to comment or ask questions related to the shared content HERE

Via Zoom Meetings:

Every month we offer an opportunity to connect with NumFOCUS Staff or with the project community specifically via the calls outlined below. Projects can attend to ask questions and share feedback on NumFOCUS and Project activities.
Monthly Project / Staff calls - bi-monthly, alternating Thursday (12pm CT) / Friday (10:30am CT)
Project Collaboration meetings - bi-monthly - in the alternating month from the Project / Staff calls
Coming soon: Office hours - starting first week of June - proposed first Thursday of the month - time to be determined.

The above methods are good for getting in touch with the staff who have dedicated time to follow NumFOCUS activities but are not ideal for community members. Common complaints I've heard numerous times from these discussion methods are either:

a) private, i.e. you have to be on a project leadership committee to know what activities the staff are focused on,
b) synchronous, making them private to only those who could attend
c) inconsistent, making it challenging for a community member to follow

I personally do not think these properties of our communication are in keeping with the open leadership methods our coding projects espouse. While certainly some things need to be private such as employee private information, a lot more of our decision making can be made in public.

Proposal

I propose we start with committees to come up with a basic structure for the committee work that allows for much more participation from the stakeholder groups. This include:

• Each committee has an open numfocus repository
• We create a more common structure with charter, ratified minutes, communication channels, and accompanying sphinx site for navigation
• Use Github Discussions for proposals and ideas before committee meetings
• Committee meetings in person focus on iterating through public boards with a focus on making sure decision points are captured correctly,

Please let me know thoughts, objections or any other things I might have forgotten.

[ivanov]

I personally do not think these properties of our communication are in keeping with the open leadership methods our coding projects espouse.

Thank you for capturing all of this, Andy, I agree with your assessment and this sounds like a sound proposal for a path forward.

[willingc]

Thanks @aterrel. GitHub provides a good place for canonical docs, minutes, and reports. I would recommend a "default to open" mode of working. In practice, very few things need to be private.