tl;dr

We need to create a strategy for the EBP organization and community moving forward, as we are nearing the final year of the grant that funded this project, and must decide how it will sustain itself moving forward. This is a proposal to convert the project into an open and inclusive community modeled after other major communities in this ecosystem.

• Find the proposal text here
• Provide comments and discussion in this issue, OR:
• Provide discussion in sub-threads in this GitHub Discussion

Background

For the last ~1.5 years, the Executable Books Project (EBP) has operated as a team of collaborators funded off of a single grant led by John S. (@jstac), with co-PIs Chris H. (@choldgraf) and Greg C.(@gregcaporaso). This has resulted in development across several repositories in the executablebooks/ GitHub organization. We have followed informal practices as a small and independent team.

We are entering the final year of the grant, and assume we won't have the same dedicated funding in the future. We must decide how we'd like this project to evolve, and what steps it will take to get there. If we wish for the project to sustain and grow its impact, we must develop a strategy for ensuring the sustainability of the project after this initial grant-funded period.

This community strategy document

I've written up a document that describes some major strategic areas where we will need to develop in order to professionalize our community and abide by best organizational practices. I've written this up in the following document:

https://hackmd.io/@choldgraf/HkgAIHtQY

It is structured around these major strategic areas of organization / community:

• define the mission and values of the organization
• define our governance and decision-making process
• define our code of conduct and mechanisms for its enforcement
• define some community practices
• describe our organizational designation

Together, these major areas describe the transformation of the Executable Books Project into the Executable Books Community (referred-to below as Executable Books, or EB).

Comments?

I'm posting this document for comment from the broader community. Especially the @executablebooks/ebpteam and @executablebooks/web-team and any regular contributors across the repositories of https://github.com/executablebooks thus far. A few that come to mind that may not be in the groups linked above: @astrojuanlu @stevejpurves @ericholscher @humitos @emdupre @martinagvilas @KirstieJane @malvikasharan @firasm @fperez @consideRatio @damianavila @moorepants @minrk @akhmerov @foster999 (and others feel free to tag folks if you think they have a stake in this project :-) )

I would like to know what others think about the major ideas in the document shared above. It is intentionally vague in some areas (where we must put in work to create specific proposals), and intentionally specific in other areas.

I've also created a Discussion thread here, with sub-threads for each of the major areas described in this proposal. I invite comment either in this issue, or in that Discussion thread if there are comments specific to a section.

Some questions to ask

• does this proposal seem sustainable and growable ?
• will it create the kind of community that you'd enjoy participating in?
• does it seem heavily biased towards a particular kind of person or perspective?
• are there any red flags in there? Anything crucial we are missing?

Next steps

I'd propose that we do the following:

1. Iterate on this document and improve it as necessary, addressing suggestions and objections from Contributors.
2. Propose a PR to executablebooks.org that incorporates these ideas into our meta docs
3. Decide whether to adopt this proposal, via a vote of the newly-designated Steering Committee, and via merging this PR (or not).
4. Begin implementing the necessary next steps to adopt these practices (e.g., define an RFC process, formalize a code of conduct, formalize team policies, decide on an organizational home, etc).

Our goal should be to have a well-functioning community that adheres to the principles described above, and with an organizational structure that is explicit. Our final "deliverable" as PIs of the grant should be to relinquish control of the project to this new organization and allow it lead the Executable Books community into the future.

Tasks

Team practices

• Make the sidebar less-cluttered in the service docs 2i2c-org/docs#105
• Team policy around requesting reviews and assigning to issues #452
• Create an "Activity Project Board" to coordinate work items across the team #441
• Decide and document our coding style for javascript / typescript #375
• Document centrally about tox/nox #112
• Specify a minimum amount of codecov coverage for PR success #87
• Reference developer conventions in repos (+CoC) #79
• Standardize docstrings #50

Governance

• Document the accounts that the Executable Books project uses, and share access with team members team-compass#3

Organizational home

• Reach out to folks in the Jupyter community to understand if there is interest in the Executable Books community becoming a sub-project