Minutes of SunPy Board Meeting 20200603
3 June, 2020
Present: David Perez-Suarez, Jack Ireland, Sabrina Savage, Steven Christe, Stuart Mumford, Monica Bobra, Bin Chen, Kevin Reardon
Absent: Russell Hewett, Tiago Pereira
Agenda:
- Board Roles
- Vision statement
- Process improvement for board structure
- Roadmap Process is missing
- Other Business
Board Roles:
Steven states that he is becoming increasingly busy, can't fully cover duties of Board Chair going forward.
Steven suggests Monica, current vice-Chair, take over role as Chair.
Monica requests time to consider taking on Chair role.
Monica suggests Jack as vice-Chair (in part due to tie-in to NASA).
Jack suggests not having a NASA employee as a board chair/vice-chair would make the project look stronger in NASA's view and in the eyes of the general solar physics community.
Stuart points out that board roles expired on April 30, and several board positions expired in March (Steven, Jack, David, and Sabrina).
Board appoints Monica as interim Chair to identify people to take on board roles.
After Board roles are filled (potentially with returning or new members), we can renew terms of Board members or identify new members.
Vote taken on allowing email voting to appoint members to board roles: Approved: 8-0
Vision statement:
Various input has been received on the draft vision statement.
Board agrees that SunPy Vision Statement should be adopted through the SEP process.
Process Improvements for Board Structure:
Steven states that default to voting "in person" (i.e. only during board meetings) is a burden.
He says that desire for in person voting was to ensure that there was discussion and thought by board members before committing to a vote.
SEP approval process maybe doesn't need continual board approval. Board should only intervene to reject or modify SEP's that appear to be controversial or problematic.
There is a possible misperception that SEP's are controlled by the board, but it is intended to be a community-driven process. Is submission of a new SEP too complex for general community involvement (given that most users can't be bothered to submit bug reports)? We only really expect SEP's to come from package maintainers or other deeply involved people (with broader community input).
Is the Board too big? What is the Board?
Is it merely advisory to the executive? Then why should it manage grant funding?
This was highlighted by the agreement with NumPy, which required a “board” to manage the NumPy-allocated money, but this is technically different from the classical SunPy board. Do we need a separate finance committee within the SunPy organization? Do we have that already (overseen by David and ?)? Should this be better codified (in preparation for future - large! - proposals)?
There was a discussion of how is Jack's HDEE funding handled - who controls spending of the funds? Jack is PI, subcontracted funding to NumPy, which put it in SunPy account, to be overseen by SunPy Board.
Is the Board responding to community needs? Does the community have the ability to control direction and purpose of SunPy project? Are we excluding people from Board who should have a say?
We should add words to SEPs that require the board to advertise board membership (Note, SEP-002 currently says that "Known upcoming vacancies shall be advertised no less than 4 months before the vacancy become available").
We should we consider having the lead developer elected from the developer community with the board just advising?
People who contribute get to have a say in the oversight of the project. But how can we bring in the user (non-contributor) community input? This is currently done through Board membership (in part), but that is by Board's prerogative.
We should strive to get community input on how the board and structure of the SunPy project should work.
Roadmap Process:
The SunPy roadmap process is not well defined. Jack said he would “take a stab” at roadmap. In part this is by identifying other people to contribute. This will also include defining mechanisms for updating the roadmap to keep it relevant.
Other Business:
Github sponsors:
Board agrees to sign up for it. David agrees to work through process.
Affiliated package liaison:
This does not necessarily need to be overseen or approved by the Board. This is more of an action on the executive side, but Stuart is happy to discuss it with the Board.
