Election Committee Post-Mortem

[mrocklin]

Hi Everyone,

Thank you all for your efforts. However, my sense is that this attempt to organize elections isn't functioning well and is unlikely to succeed with the current direction. I think that it's time for NumFOCUS to try a different approach. I'll include some observations and recommendations for a next iteration below.

One Election

I would focus on running a single election, rather than on trying to form a committee. We lost a couple of weeks on organizational minutiae that (in my opinion) were not important to the critical path and burned momentum.

Besides I don't think we have enough knowledge today to know (or care) about how best to create a multi-year committee like this. There's a lot of learning ahead of NumFOCUS I think.

Execution vs Perspectives

The committee had a dual goal:

1. Give external perspective on the election in order to avoid bias and improve legitimacy
2. Execute the election

These are very different goals, and they probably need very different groups of people. In order to avoid bias / improve legitimacy I think that you want a broad set of people to observe and weigh in from lots of different backgrounds. There also isn't much work required or coordination here, so having a big group isn't harmful.

However, In order to execute an election you want a small group of people who have all committed to doing work, and who already work well together. They should all be in similar timezones and it's probably ok if they think pretty similarly (broad perspectives are useful here, but not as useful as above).

For the rest of this I'm going to focus mostly on execution, because that is what I personally was focused on

Committee selection

The process here was an open call "do you want to be on this committee?" and all were accepted. I recommend a different approach.

At the very least for execution I recommend that we at least set an expectation of work. I think that historically the SciPy conference asked "How many hours per week are you able to work on this project?" which was a good filter. I'd say that the election is likely to take ~5 hours per week for a few weeks. Some committees are about talking. Some committees are about doing. This is a "doing" committee and people need to opt-in to that early on.

Additionally, I could imagine other configurations here to finding a set of people to execute the election:

1. Pay a group that does this professionally (do these exist?)
2. Nominate a single Czar to do it (it's actually not that much work, the challenge is trying to coordinate many people to do that work together) and give them a lot of control (it would be very frustrating to do a bunch of work that is then judged by people who don't do work)
3. Engage one of the various professional services groups in our space (Quansight? Quanstack?) to execute the election. For a professional group doing something like this is trivial.
4. Have one of the projects / conference groups run things? They already know how to work well together.
5. Have NumFOCUS staff run this (although this would make me nervous for bias reasons)

Communication thoughts

This is subjective and many things could work

In our particular configuration we had three places to talk about things:

1. Slack
2. Github
3. Zoom meetings

Personally I was happy with our choice to use Github (even though it failed in the end). Probably we should have chosen one of Slack or GitHub though. Communication was diffuse.

In hindsight we should have had a regular zoom meeting (tangent: even though I dislike these). Doing a Doodle poll every meeting was bad. Also, trying to do this across all timezones was bad.

Recommendation

I'd ask Quansight to do it if they're game. Pitch it to them as a good marketing opportunity. They've been in the space for a long time, are pretty well trusted, and have a strong vested interest in NumFOCUS's success.

This doesn't solve the legitimacy problem, but that should maybe be solved separately from execution (perhaps invite project/meetup leaders to assess the work).

I'm out

Anyway, to make things explicit, I'm no longer planning to do work on this effort. If there's some official way to step down as chair then I'm doing that now. I've already communicated much of the above to @lsilen and @dutc .

If other people who were active in this effort have thoughts or constrictive critiques or suggestions I encourage them to voice them here and maybe whoever comes next will be able to learn from that experience.

Thanks all for your trust. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to deliver.

Cheers,
-matt

[ivanov]

Thank you for your efforts in steering the election committee, Matt, appreciated your communication style and clear expectation setting. A lot more got done than would have otherwise without your involvement.

[aterrel]

The last time I was involved in the broad community board selection, I used Election Buddy. It worked well enough. They do provide services for running elections but that's just the mechanical part, which is a ton of work.

https://electionbuddy.com/pricing-professional-services/?_gl=1*31ybmr*_up*MQ..

[jaspajjr]

Thanks Matt, I appreciated the work you've done leading the group, and the work you put into putting these thoughts together. I agree with Paul that without your influence we wouldn't have made anywhere near as much progress.

I think we made some progress on deciding what we want to achieve, as there was definitely a learning curve from my side as a new committee member. But as you rightly said Matt its a disparate group of people who are bringing together and we need to create a shared understanding. And as someone who has worked with PyData but not directly with NumFocus a lot of learning for me to do. A wide representative group is probably not the way to go at this point.

[aterrel]

So who has the ball now? Most in the community do not have access to the slack channel or the zoom calls? I think Paul's post certainly raised awareness that an important process is going on.

[mrocklin]

So who has the ball now?

On the election I don't know. My guess is that @lsilen has communicated my departure to the board and that Leah + Board are figuring out a next step. I'm happy to help with that discussion if that would be helpful.

Today there is no active momentum / effort that I know of.

[lsilen]

I think the decision to form a committee and have community input and participation in how the election is run is the right direction. There are actions we can take to streamline processes. However, a formal committee requires work to get up and running. This is common with most committees, but the Election Committee now has a charter in place. There's a committee meeting scheduled for Friday at 10am CT. Three members have RSVP'd yes, and one maybe. I spoke with Cheuk at PyData Berlin, and she will not be able to serve on the committee due to time limitations. The agenda hasn't been sent yet, but it will include the items below. Some of these are based on Matt's suggestions (thank you, Matt). 1. Determine who would like to remain on the committee, I've spoken to a few members but haven't been able to connect with everyone. 2. Determine the amount of time those who would like to stay on are able to allocate weekly 3. Set a time for recurring meetings 4. Review expectations - this will include clarification on the areas where committee perspective is needed to avoid bias, areas where the committee will be responsible for execution, and areas where NF staff will be able to provide administrative support 5. Review action items to start the election process and set execution timeline I'm happy to help get things back on track. Leah

…

--- Leah Silen Executive Director She/Her numfocus.org

On Tue, Apr 23, 2024 at 7:32 AM Andy R. Terrel ***@***.***> wrote: So who has the ball now? Most in the community do not have access to the slack channel or the zoom calls? I think Paul's post certainly raised awareness that an important process is going on. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#9 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABJA3VYBOLZO6UFY5EGH4GDY6ZIHBAVCNFSM6AAAAABGP4PW7KVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZDANZSGE4DAMJQGI> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[SylvainCorlay]

I am in full agreement with Leah. We now have a formal committee set up with a charter. Forming a formal committee and taking input from the community is the right direction. While it can be more lengthy than just "running a single election", it is required to establish this process for a more sustainable future.

[ivanov]

Since Matt asked for suggestions, and I suggest that attendance and quality minutes need to be taken for the committee to stay on track, especially in the inevitable event of missed meetings.

One of the ways I thought I could help by modeling what reasonable minute taking could look like. You can compare what the committee's minutes look like at the meetings I attended (March 1st and 18th) versus the ones I did not (March 8th and 28th) - which, for example, don't even have a list of attendees.

[ivanov]

I would also suggest that all current board members be invited to the private election-committee slack channel.

[aterrel]

A few recommendations I would make:

• I disagree with the notion that the community should focus on a single election. Short term thinking is why the policies and work has been subpar.
• The board recognized the problems with its election process, and that’s why it has formed this committee
• The election committee should open to new member with the recent departures
• The board should campaign to get more seasoned community leaders on the committee
• The election committee should follow the process outlined in its charter
• If the community wants to affect the voting process of the board, they should do it through this process
• If the community wants to change the structure of the board to be radically different, then someone should write a petition and get signatures of community members.

More rough context on my position here