The official version of this document, along with a list of individuals and institutions in the roles defined in the governance section below, is contained in The Project Governance Repository at:
https://github.com/pangeo-data/governance
The Pangeo Project (The Project) is an open source software project. The goal of The Project is to develop open source software and related technology for the analysis of large scientific datasets. The Project endeavors to extend the broader scientific software ecosystem. The Software developed by The Project is released under the BSD (or similar) open source license, developed openly and hosted in public GitHub repositories under the Pangeo-data GitHub organization. Examples of Project Software include the tools and configurations related to the deployment of computational infrastructure. The Services run by The Project consist of public websites and web-services that are hosted under the pangeo.io or pangeo-data.org domains. Examples of Project Services include the Pangeo website (https://pangeo-data.org and https://pangeo.io), Pangeo-JupyterHub deployments (https://pangeo.pydata.org and https://pangeo.informaticslab.co.uk), and the Pangeo-Binder (https://binder.pangeo.io).
The Project is developed by a team of distributed developers, called Contributors. Contributors are individuals who have contributed to code, code reviews, documentation, design, and infrastructure, or to mailing lists, chats, community help and community building, education and outreach, or other work in relation to one or more Project repositories. Anyone can be a Contributor. Contributors can be affiliated with any legal entity or none. Contributors participate in The Project by submitting, reviewing and discussing GitHub Pull Requests and Issues and participating in open and public Project discussions on GitHub, Gitter chat rooms and mailing lists. The foundation of Project participation is openness and transparency.
Here is a list of the current Contributors to the main Pangeo repository:
https://github.com/pangeo-data/pangeo/graphs/contributors
There are also many other Contributors listed in the logs of other repositories of the Pangeo Project.
The collection of all Contributors to The Project and stakeholders in The Project, including Users and Funders, is called The Community. Contributors work on behalf of and are responsible to the larger Project Community and we strive to keep the barrier between Contributors and Users as low as possible.
The Project will have a Steering Council that consists of Project Contributors nominated as expalined below. The Steering Council should be composed of a diverse array of backgrounds, viewpoints and talents. The overall role of the Council is to ensure, through taking input from the Community, the long-term well-being of The Project, both technically and as a community. As The Project draws its strength from representing the Community, it strives to avoid fragmentation of the Community into separate projects, if possible. The Steering Council will maintain a minimum of three members.
During the everyday Project activities, Council Members participate in all discussions, code review and other Project activities as peers with all other Contributors and the Community. In these everyday activities, Council Members do not have any special power or privilege through their membership on the Council. However, it is expected that because of the quality and quantity of their contributions and their expert knowledge of The Project Software and Services that Council Members will provide useful guidance, both technical and in terms of Project direction, to potentially less experienced Contributors.
The Steering Council and its Members play a special role in certain situations. In particular, the Council may:
- Make decisions about the overall scope, vision and direction of The Project.
- Make decisions about strategic collaborations with other organizations or individuals.
- Make decisions about specific technical issues, features, bugs and pull requests. They are the primary mechanism of guiding the code review process and merging pull requests.
- Make decisions about the Services that are run by The Project and manage those Services for the benefit of The Project and Community.
- Make decisions when regular Community discussion doesn’t produce consensus on an issue in a reasonable time frame.
Outcomes and decisions should be clearly communicated to the Community. This can take three different forms:
- New challenges for Pangeo will be detailed as a GitHub issue for the Community to discuss.
- Resolved technical deadlocks will result in an explanation on the relevant issue and/or closure of the relevant pull request.
- Other decisions will be detailed as a narrative blog post.
To become eligible for being a Steering Council Member an individual must be a Project Contributor who has produced contributions that are substantial in quality and quantity, and sustained over at least six months. After confirming the potential Council Member is interested and willing to serve in that capacity, Members are nominated by Community Contributors and voted upon by the existing Council via majority vote.
When considering potential Members, the Council will look at candidates with a comprehensive view of their contributions. This will include but is not limited to code, code review, infrastructure work, mailing list and chat participation, community help/building, education and outreach, design work, etc. We are deliberately not setting arbitrary quantitative metrics (like “100 commits in this repo”) to avoid encouraging behavior that plays to the metrics rather than The Project’s overall well-being. We want to encourage a diverse array of backgrounds, viewpoints and talents in our team, which is why we explicitly do not define code as the sole metric on which Council Membership will be evaluated.
There are two mechanisms by which a Council Member may exit the Steering Council:
- Council Members may resign their posting at any time during their tenure on the Steering Council. In order to maintain an active, energetic, and healthy council, Council Members will self-facilitate membership check-ins every 6 months to confirm that each member intends on continue their service on the Council.
- A majority of the existing Council votes to remove a Member.
If a Council Member becomes inactive in The Project for a period of one year, they will be considered for removal from the Council. Before removal, an inactive Member will be approached by the a Council Member to see if they plan on returning to active participation. If not they will be removed immediately upon a Council vote. If they plan on returning to active participation soon, they will be given a grace period of one year. If they don’t return to active participation within that time period they will be removed by vote of the Council without further grace period.
All former Council Members can be considered for Membership again at any time in the future, like any other Project Contributor. Retired Council Members will be listed on the Project website, acknowledging the period during which they were active in the Council.
Steering council members are expected to commit to the following activities:
- Attend a one-hour steering council meeting every quarter.
- Respond in a timely manner to steering-council-related correspondence.
- Act as an ambassador for the project in professional contexts.
- Contribute to fulfilling the Project's obligations to its Fiscal Sponsor.
It is expected that Council Members will be employed at a wide range of companies, universities and non-profit organizations. Because of this, it is possible that Members will have conflict of interests. Such conflict of interests include, but are not limited to:
- Financial interests, such as investments, employment, or contracting work, outside of The Project that may influence their work on The Project.
- Access to proprietary information of their employer that could potentially leak into their work with The Project.
- An issue where the person privately gains an advantage from The Project resources, but The Project has no gain or suffers a disadvantage.
All Members of the Council shall disclose to the rest of the Council any conflict of interest they may have. Members with a conflict of interest in a particular issue may participate in Council discussions on that issue, but must recuse themselves from voting on the issue.
The Project is associated with a Fiscal Sponsor. The Fiscal Sponsor maintains all legal and fiduciary responsibility for the Project and its employees. The current Fiscal Sponsor of the project is NumFOCUS Inc. The Steering Council will delegate one member to be the official liaison with the Fiscal Sponsor.
The Fiscal Sponsor provides banking services to the Project and maintains a dedicated bank account for the Project (Project Funds). The Project may obtain funds from donations, grants, fees, and services. Any use of Project Funds must be approved by a majority vote of the Steering Council.
Individuals or institutions who make donations to the project (cash or in-kind) will be acknowledged as official Project Sponsors. The Steering Council may choose to define specific sponsorship tiers and mechanisms of acknowledgement of Project Sponsors via a Sponsorship Policy. The Sponsorship Policy is not considered part of this governance document.
The Steering Council is the primary leadership for The Project. No outside sponsor, institution, individual or legal entity has the ability to own, control, usurp or influence The Project other than by participating in the Project as Contributors and Council Members.
Changes to the governance documents are submitted via a GitHub pull request to The Project's governance documents GitHub repository at https://github.com/pangeo-data/governance. The pull request is then refined in response to public comment and review, with the goal being consensus in the community. The period for open comment will last in proportional to the complexity of the changes; major changes will be open for comment for no less than two weeks. After this open period, a Steering Council Member proposes to the Steering Council that the changes be ratified and the pull request merged (accepting the proposed changes) or proposes that the pull request be closed without merging (rejecting the proposed changes). The Member should state the final commit hash in the pull request being proposed for acceptance or rejection and briefly summarize the pull request. A minimum of 80% of the Steering Council must vote and at least 2/3 of the votes must be positive to carry out the proposed action (fractions of a vote rounded up to the nearest integer).