There’s 141 people who are in the slack channel where proposals get discussed, including yourself as of a few hours ago when I added you according to your request upstream to the relevant slack channel. The review committee is just whoever of those people reviews proposals and then shows up to the meeting about it. Usually it’s the mentors for the projects that were proposed, since they’re gonna have to do the work. It’s not some big secret. People were asked to volunteer and basically anybody who was known in the community and willing to step up was invited.
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I wonder why anyone would think that. Going by the moderators and stewards groups, neither Jeff nor Chris (nor many more) are Stewards. And I would think that we do all agree that those two represent “open source Julia” like (very) few others, if any?
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Can we discuss these important matters in a place where the conversation history is not lost? I don’t want to bring the Slack gripe to this thread, which is already super long, but the decision to remain on Slack when a lot of people in the community tried to move to Zulip+Discourse is one example of not listening to the community as a whole, or not foreseeing the impact of this decision in the long-term.
My account on Slack only exists so that people can ping me, and because many important things are announced in the #general channel before they get lost forever.
As a member of the group, you’re welcome to propose it. If a sufficient number of people agree, it might happen. But more generally, I feel like you’re a bit stuck on a notion of power that’s not really how anything works. There is no wizard, it’s volunteers all the way down. Nobody really has any power to make anybody do anything.
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Man, it’s hard to read your messages and assume good intentions (and not just see accusations).
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I’ll suggest it. But the social dynamic I remember at the time this topic was brought up was that many people liked the idea but 1 or 2 important names stepped up against it and the discussion ended. Let’s see if this time things are different.
What is sufficient in this context? Who gives the final word?
Every social group is made of people with different powers. I don’t have the same power that you or Viral have to decide important changes in the Julia project for example. I can only suggest changes, but the final word is yours.
Wasn’t this covered by
There is no wizard, it’s volunteers all the way down. Nobody really has any power to make anybody do anything.
? I imagine the point is that if people were to agree then people would slowly migrate over rather than one person making the call.
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This is nonsense. Those one or two people have zero power to keep anyone on Slack. There are many reasons a majority of people may choose to stay on Slack. A perceived clunky UI of Zulip, “not yet another platform”, and maybe even that not everything has to be on the permanent record. You have a voice in the community, but you are not the voice of the community. Please stop these insinuations that there is a cabal of core members oppressing the community at large.
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Not one person, but a established official committee. That is what I am trying to say.
One needs people with final decision power to remove the subjectivity of “sufficient number of people”. Otherwise the question never converges. Let me give you a concrete example.
Say I ask on Slack the following question:
Do you agree that we should abandon Slack in favor of platforms that preserve conversation history?
What if this question gets 100 likes. What if it gets 20 likes? Who is going to step up with a clear statement that says something like: “We the committee selected by the community thought about this issue deeply, and considered that this move is beneficial for the community. It will help AI bots gather data, it will help future users with content, etc. etc. Therefore, we suggest that new conversations are created in other platforms already in use by the community. We will be archiving slack channels by date DD/MM/YYYY. People can remain chatting here as an unofficial community channel.”
Maybe, but I’m pointing out that he already said there is no such thing. I don’t think people want to keep repeating themselves in this thread.
(I don’t think you even need a committee to decide this. If people want it they can step up and make the change and see what happens. FWIW, I don’t think people will migrate to Zulip in general either - if people in this community all wanted Zulip they would have migrated by now. Maybe they like the ephemeral part.)
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Who is going to step up with a clear statement that says something like:
It has been said really often in this thread already:
It will be the person that does the work of moving things to another platform - which is often one of the people who is heavily involved in Julia & Juliahub, who ends up volunteering doing the actual work of going through with such a decision - which is quite a lot of work usually.
You could at any point be that person… If people follow is another question and nobody will be able to change that.
I’ve been that person for Makie to move away from slack, which was quite a lot of work, and wasn’t entirely successful since people tend to stick to slack - all, even though by your argument I’d be the person “in power”… Which in open source most often translates to “the person who picks up most of the work others don’t want to do” …
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I don’t know if you have watched this where Tim explains his work on julia was motivated based on practical needs, if not you should.
Nobody forced Tim to improve Julia and bring us precompile tools and greatly improved ttfx that everybody are enjoying right now. Someone just starts something and it gets traction. The social dynamics are not dictatorship or democracy, it is Actionism, people who do the work. There has been a good amount of suggestions in this thread on how to take action to make vscode plugin better.
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Can you elaborate on why do you think a committee is not necessary?
For sure there will be people with different personal preferences. It doesnt mean that this is what is best to the majority of the open source community. That is where a diverse and accountable committee comes in to decide important matters.
I elaborated why in the sentence that followed your quote.
For sure there will be people with different personal preferences. It doesnt mean that this is what is best to the majority of the open source community. That is where a diverse and accountable committee comes in to decide important matters.
For a group of volunteers I think it is best that they do what is most convenient for them and already works for them. You are asking a lot of people who are unpaid and I don’t imagine they will be so responsive to someone coming in demanding to change the entire status quo.
Honestly I don’t see what more there is to gain from this thread continuing at this point either.
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I still think there is a fundamental misunderstanding here. The Julia Project doesn’t have much of a hierarchical structure because “The Julia Project” is not really a thing. As explained in this blog post, which may be slightly outdated,
The Julia project was founded by Jeff Bezanson, Alan Edelman, Viral B. Shah and Stefan Karpinski. It consists of some code and a community of people who work on that code. The most clear cut line that can be drawn is that there is a set of people who have commit access to the JuliaLang GitHub organization […]. This set of people doesn’t really define the project, however, since there are many people who are prolific contributors to the Julia ecosystem but who do not have “commit bit.” The communal nature of open source makes it difficult to precisely define where the Julia project ends and the greater community begins, which is exactly how we like it.
At the end of the day, what we have is a bunch of independent entities doing different things, none of which answers to another in general[1]:
- Research labs
- Private companies
- Community stewards
- Forum moderators
- NumFocus liaisons
- JuliaCon organizers
- Reviewers for GSoC and other events
Most of these positions are occupied by volunteers who donate their free time to the community. It’s not being piloted from above, it’s self-organizing. Which also explains why key projects like VSCode may get insufficient funding.
In my humble opinion, the solution for that is not to create an all-powerful Julia committee which would allocate money, time or talent towards the VSCode extension. The real way to help is to go find some of this money / time / talent and see how part of the ecosystem can coordinate from the bottom up around a VSCode push.
except some dependencies like NumFocus for fiscal and legal aspects I assume ↩︎
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As for the closing timer, this is me trying to do my job as a forum moderator. Part of that job means ensuring that the energy of members is directed towards something actionable and specific, rather than broad complaints. I’m not affiliated with JuliaHub, MIT, JuliaCon, NumFocus or any of these other entities, so I don’t have a dog in this fight other than the well-being of the whole community. That being said, I don’t mean to censor anyone, so if there is a majority vote to keep this topic open, we will.
Should this topic be left open, or closed in favor of more specific discussions?
- Left open
- Closed in favor of more specific discussions
0
voters
Sounds to me like you want to overcomplicate things with endless layers of committees and processes. When there is already a lack of volunteers, that seems like a great way to bring things to an absolute standstill. How about you let the people actually doing the work decide how they want to organize it? You do not get to impose on the time of these volunteers. As far as I can tell, the Julia community is very open to anyone who wants to contribute, so let’s not complicate that needlessly.
Of course, it’s good to have some information in an easy to find place about which community efforts exist, how they fit together, and how to join them (the information Keno and Viral provided).
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How to move to another plataform if no decision was made to move to another platform?
I will reiterate my point one more time: who am I to state that the slack is unofficial? Will people adhere to my personal movement? No. Will they see it as a community movement if an elected committee suggests the move? More likely.
The larger the community the more committees are needed. The Julia community is limited on people partly because there is no clear governance model that invites people with diverse background outside the existing bubble. People will always feel super busy with multple tasks if these processes are not formalized like in other communities.
Compare the 2 different approaches to governance:
- You have an active committee that is diverse and representative of the various facets of the community. This committee actively invites specific people that they see as eminent in the community to replace members who can no longer be in the committee. Decisions are carefully studied after they are raised by comminuty members. They then reply with an official recommendation to improve the status quo.
- No public committee is accountable for major decisions like deprecating Slack in favor of other platforms. We rely on global agreement, which is not well-defined, and keep bringing the same issues over and over again when people feel bothered. Because there is no open record of the decisions made, people cannot know if something was already brought up. After a couple of interactions, which often derail in personal attacks, nothing changes. No one is willing to be the person accountable for important changes alone.
I am here with the only intention to improve core issues that I see. I speak with passion and dont measure my words to point lack of diversity and strategy. I may just stop doing this after some time, specially if I loose hope that things will change like other colleagues of mine did.
I think those involved might be more open/receptive to change/your arguments once you are in the actual process for longer. I think those who are already deeply involved in the process should be the ones making these arguments and asking for change. If I were involved I do not think I would appreciate all this doubt in the work being done like no one has thought of these things before.
I do not also believe that committes are 100% an improvement and will probably have the opposite effect of demotivating those already doing the unpaid work-with heavy emphasis on unpaid-if every single decision has to go through some higher power. They will not appreciate you or whoever else trying to barge in and demand change for a system that is working well enough - good intentions or otherwise.
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