Add strategic planning role

[eteq]

This came out of some discussions the CoCo has been having the last few months on whose role it is to do big picture planning. We eventually settled on the reality of the current situation: that it has historically been something the CoCo does, but it is not necessary that this be so, and we should make it an explicit role so others can participate if they want.

As a starting point I named the people as just "the CoCo members" since that's the current reality, but that could change if others want to lean in on this topic.

[pllim]

I announced this at https://groups.google.com/g/astropy-dev/c/ndxxWPl-gb4 , thus starting the two-week timer. FYI.

[hamogu]

I would suggest to leave this open to the coordination meeting. A lot of strategic planning should happen there! Personally, I'm also interested in these things. However, there is a question of how we organize in practice. In my experience, strategic planning is one of those things that profit from real-time talk (in person or on zoom), unlike, e.g. subpackage maintaining (which can be done fine asynchronosly on GH).
Maybe dedicate one Coco meeting or one dev telecon every other months (because in practice this overlaps with Coco membership and interested developer membership) to strategic planning and open it to all interested parties?

[pllim]

Given the meeting is less than 2 months away, sure, we can wait. I added to ideas here:

• Coordination Meeting 2024 astropy-project#349 (comment)

[pllim]

One member expressed desire to wait till Coordination meeting, so I am blocking merge for now. Thanks!

[astrofrog]

Just an idea - it seems this would effectively be a steering committee? If so it might be worth considering using a name like this so that it is more familiar for external people, if it becomes an entity that does grow beyond the CoCo.

[eteq]

@hamogu - totally agree as much of this as possible could happen at coordination meetings and dev telecons. That's the right place to do things like set the strategic goals, etc since it is a larger swathe of the community. The problem is in execution - right now it's not attached to any role, which means it has defaulted to the CoCo as the main body that picks up organizational things that no one else is doing but need doing (not formally per se, just by convention), and we were hoping to make that explicit and allow others who might be interested to join without having to also be on the CoCo.

So in my mind this group is as much focused on making sure this stuff happens (where "this stuff" includes "preparing for and having all the needed conversations at the Coordination meeting"), rather than on actually setting the strategy per se. I could definitely see re-word this to emphasize that point though, since I can see how the first bullet might read as "this group sets the strategy". Do you have any suggested wording for that or should I take a shot at it?

@astrofrog - hmm, I see what you're saying, but for me "steering committee" sounds more like what the CoCo does in its regular role - i.e., not long-term vision but keeping the boat going in a particular direction. But I dunno, I also tend to make new names because of subtle differences and you're right that it might just confuse matters further...

[eteq]

Oh, and @hamogu , re-reading your message, I'm not clear on this: were you saying we should discuss whether to create this role at the coordination meeting (as @pllim interpreted it) or that this role should partly be done by the coordination meeting (as I interpreted it). Or both? Just trying to understand if you were saying action on this should wait on the meeting or not.

(In practice it probably doesn't really matter, since the CoCo is already likely to bring up the strategic items at the meeting as it stands, but I think it will make it slightly easier to recruit folks at the coordination meeting if this roles exists by then since we can say "do you want to join the group?" rather than "do you want to join a group that may or may not exist?")

[eteq]

Answering my own question - out-of-band (in the developer telecon) @hamogu said the answer was "both" - which I am totally fine with, just wanted the clarification.

[hamogu]

The coordination meeting does fill this role - that's what it is for. So, that should be reflected in the description of the role (e.g. "stratetic planning in between coordination meetings" or "monitoring ... as set by coordination meetings".

But I also think that this role should be created at the coordination meeting. It's more open and inclusive to ask for interested parties there, than to pre-fill the role with default names first.

[pllim]

So this is more like "strategic plans enforcer" instead of "strategic planning"? 🤔

[astrofrog]

Ok so a few thoughts having taken a bit more time to digest this:

• @eteq - I agree that steering committee isn't right because given the range of definitions out there it doesn't really distinguish it from coordination committee.
• Should the role being proposed here be called a 'group' or a 'committee'? For example 'Strategic Planning Committee' or 'Strategic Planning Group'. It's likely it would operate as a group or committee rather than individual people with a role acting independently?
• One of the things that's I've been wondering how we could improve is that indeed beyond the CoCo, any kind of strategic planning is restricted to (at most) once a year for other project members. If strategic planning was done as a committee with regular telecons, it could be a way of increasing participation throughout the year.

@eteq - you said 'could happen at coordination meetings and dev telecons' - I guess we should think about whether to treat the dev telecons as mini coordination meetings in the sense they could also cover strategic stuff and non-development things, or keep the dev telecons be about dev and have separate calls for strategic planning?