August 15, 2024, Advisory Committee only

Community Day-to-day project operations
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Attendees

  • Julie Faure-Lacroix - Advisory Committee
  • Jan Ainali - Advisory Committee
  • Esther M. Jackson - Advisory Committee
  • Martin Magdinier - Project Manager

Discussions

Budget Review

Martin presented the last budget projection and changes since the Barcamp presentation

  • We already ask for a no-cost extension for the EOSS-Diversity grant
  • Martin asked CS&S to move Antonin's invoices from May and June 2024 to EOSS-Diversity
  • Martin did a tentative Barcamp budget (we are missing the transactions and actual exchange rate)

The advisory committee decided on the following action regarding the remaining funds for the EOSS-Diversity and EOSS-5 grant:

  • Martin will send the EOSS-5 grant no-cost request next week with a budget to pay a Project Manager and Developer to complete the project by October 2025.
  • Martin to get back to Sheila on what we need: a decision-making process to assess and redefine governance structure (see governance discussion below)
  • This way, we keep our options open regarding budget allocation for the EOSS-Diversity grant between further work on OpenRefine governance and paying Antonin for the rest of 2024.

Governance

The Advisory Committee and Martin feel stuck as there is no clear way to reach an agreement and have a commitment within the community. Martin will get back to Sheila from Bocoup on what we need: a decision-making process to assess and redefine the governance structure to see if they can help.

The group discuss further the need for a stakeholder map

  • To identify community/partner we are not speaking with but should
  • Use that as a tool to steer the conversation more productively by providing data and facts
  • The map should be built with the community's input.

Martin shares his review of the Inkscape governance model and found it interesting for OpenRefine.

Funding

Martin provided an update following the call regarding the funding pipeline with Danielle on August 6 with the following next steps:

  1. EOSS-5 see previous point.

  2. Outreach campaign to increase corporate and individual donations to OpenRefine. Martin needs to prepare the following to present to Lila Jane from serialcommaconsulting.org

    • Mission Vision
    • Community we impact
    • Project History
    • A list of potential donors may overlap with the stakeholder map

  3. Wikimedia Community Fund: Martin scheduled a meeting with Veronica Hamaini for September 3.

  4. NFDI: The group discussed whether OpenRefine is the right entity to support the project MediaWiki extension for reconciliation with Wikibase funded via an NFDI grant. This is related to the thread Fundraising to commission the development of a MediaWiki extension for reconciliation with Wikibase. The advisory committee decided that unless there is a significant need to go through OpenRefine, we do not need to be involved in the process. We are happy to endorse the plan if it will help secure funding.

Survey:

The survey is live. We received 57 answers so far. Martin is planning to do more outreach. Jan will ask Wikimedia if they can share it in their socials

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Can you list some of the "stuck parts" that were brought up in your Advisory Committee meeting about the community's OpenRefine Governance?

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What we are missing is how to turn those conversations into action. How do we make a decision and have the community commit to it? The thread Improving Transparency: Advisory Committee's Role and Community Involvement, is a good example of a conversation that does not materialize into action.

I think this is also well synthesized in Bocoup report on page 6:

Additionally, several interviewees expressed concerns about how decisions are made at OpenRefine.* *Specifically, interviewees noted decision making feeling overly centralized in a small group of vocal community members, many users not having influence over the priorities, and a lack of clarity in the expectations and modes of engagement.

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Well, we post things on the forum to gather consensus as good open source maintainers. But then many folks don't care about governance, only a few are vocal, that's totally fine and expected. Meritocracy at its finest. At the end of the day, because we truly do want to embrace the notion of meritocracy more (otherwise NOTHING would likely get done), then when there is not sufficient community input to make a decision, the Project Director would ultimately make decisions and perform actions. This is not unheard of in other open source communities.

There's a fundamental difference between TALK and ACTION. I don't see many in the community caring enough to ACT, so then someone else must in order to move the OpenRefine progress needle forward.

Given your reading of everyone's input, their concerns, their requests for small changes in the governance in areas... then do your best to draft that... if you have updated the Governance based on the conversations from the community over the last 2 recent years, then I think you've done an excellent job.

So the final act would be to likely move the governance model back over to more of an Apache-style consensus based meritocracy... which is pretty much what 5+ contributors have vocalized already.

The only real thing that needs constant grooming in Issues and Blog posts and having monthly community meetings, is that which would reflect the community's concerns regarding:

" There was a theme around wanting community members to feel like they’re part of a project where developers are listening to them about what to prioritize, and where there is clarity on how to interact and exchange ideas.""

@antonin_d and I have hosted those meetings. Hardly anyone in the community shows up to them. We do well to include them.

and your comment:

" * I still struggle to understand how we get consensus on large changes (governance or software-wise) and who (and by who, I mean which individual and how they are elected) can approve those changes."

So, we talked in meetings, barcamp, forum, about ways to improve that and generally got consensus on how to improve and consider the community's wishes and priorities (using perhaps a better system than just GitHub provides, or trying better labels, milestones, project issue management, etc.)

So in my mind? 2 things need to happen now:

  1. Go back to Apache-style consensus based meritocracy. Making changes were necessary in the Governance.
  2. Use GitHub Projects to showcase the roadmap. Like here: Quarterly roadmap · Roadmap (github.com) We can highlight in a Blog post the Quarterly expected items to be completed. I just added mine - the OpenRefine launcher to easier start/stop. Other contributors can add theirs that they are working on as well. This is at least a start on improving our transparency. Users and the community can join our monthly/quarterly meetings or post in forums or comment in issues.
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@thadguidry, thanks for the feedback and kind words. I have a rough draft for the governance coming up for discussion.

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Thanks, this was very interesting. The roadmap link doesn't work. Is the page live somewhere else?

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@Martin could you make that GitHub Project public please? I don't have the necessary rights

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