The end blog post is ready. Martin needs to publish it
Graphics and overall analysis for the 2024 user survey are completed; Martin needs to write the final blog post. This will be done by year-end and after publishing the year-end blog post.
2023 Wikimedia Foundation
Contract with WMSE should be completed today
We have identified one trainer to write the diff post
WMSE submitted this morning their draft reports
Governance discussion
Martin relayed to the Advisory Committee conversation he had with community member regarding the open PR and recent conversation on the forum.
The advisory community understands the feedback to document policies specific to its governance separately.
The suggestion is to better identify the actual governance from policy.
Instead of creating another set of documents that we don't know where to publish them (the main OpenRefine repo does not seem to be the right place), the suggestion is to break the current governance document into two sections
The actual governance to present the Roles and responsibilities
A policies section with details for
Member election
Conflict of interest
Managing funding
Next
Martin to continue the conversation with community members
Martin will update the PR with the proposed changes.
Renewing Martin's contract
What's in scope
The group worked to
Identified the different task that needs to be done
Separate those performed by a Project Manager and those relevant to a Community Manager
The group also discussed an option to delegate some tasks to Advisory Committee members further and acknowledged that CS&S has been providing more support for fundraising since September 2024.
The conversation is set to continue during the next Advisory Committee meeting.
Budget review
From reviewing the list of tasks, it appears that the budget allocation would be at a minimum of 10 hours/per week for the project manager and at least 10 hours/per week for community management.
The latest budget version planned for 10h/week for the position. We previously identified this as the minimal team.
The latest budget version also allocated USD17,000 for the organization of a Barcamp in 2025.
Question: Do we want to redirect part of the funds allocated to the Barcamp to a project manager position? This can be discussed openly with the community.
Developer Hiring
The group reviewed the resume received and the first interview performed by Martin.
Uh, who is the "we" in that question? You're doing it again not clarifying the hat your wearing in a question, and thus it's confusing me who is asking this question, the Advisory? or Martin the current Project Director of OpenRefine? If I'm a user, and part of the community, do I have a say or can vote somewhere on allocation of funds that OpenRefine the project holds (through it's fiscal sponsor)?
Can we just put 1 or 2 developers into this "Advisory Committee" and then rename it "Project Leadership team" and thus call it a day and eliminate all this back and forth? Because that inner circle I described around the source code, is really developers and then a smaller width ring around that developer circle is the Advisory Committee, and where I'd prefer we just cut the cord and make the Advisory Committee become the "Project Leadership team" who then meet to discuss all the same things in the same meeting currently the Advisory Committee does (you have to be voted into the Project Leadership team). The word "Advisory" has become a painful eyesore and fingersore with actually no use because it's not purely in advisory mode 75% of the time. But instead often directly in a "Project Leadership" role with the current Project Director, some Project Advisors, and now no developers.
Easy fix for all that. Rename the Committee, put at least 1-2 developers in it - elected, and then the Governance becomes so much more simple.
I think it would make sense to onboard more people who are active on GitHub into the committee. I wouldn't be surprised if some people would be interested to be involved, but just don't feel invited because there is no open call to join. Would you like to join again @thadguidry for instance? How about @ostephens, @tfmorris, @abbe98?
Renaming the committee would also make sense in my opinion.
I could join again, sure. We'd need to put this up for a vote somewhere publicly. (And so I guess I accept you nominating me )
The issues prior to creating the Advisory Committee need to be embellished into the Governance, so that we don't repeat those prior mistakes. Something like this:
Our Project Leadership team are nominated and elected by Users and Developers to ensure that it remains well-rounded with many voices of our community elected into it's fold representing: Users, Developers, Advisors
This would help circumvent the main issue we had (and why we thought of making the Advisory Committee) of not including the community of Users and Groups(Advisors) that we once had with only Developers really participating in pseudo roundtable discussions in our dev mailing list that didn't include users & groups.
Thank you @thadguidry for the feedback regarding the proposed changes to the governance
"We" as an undefined collective. As mentioned in the second sentence, this conversation needs to happen with community input. I am unsure how to phrase it yet, so we have meaningful feedback. The advisory committee plans to refine this during our call next week.
Currently, the Advisory Committee selects its members, similar to how the committer and core development groups operate. Last week, the advisory committee discussed how to improve community representation. I expect this to take a few weeks (or months?) before a proposition emerges.
I support the idea of adopting a different model (for example, contributors voting advisory committee members and ensuring various communities are represented). This is what I tried to do here, but I never managed to get consensus around it. For now, my focus is to document how we currently operate and not introduce significant changes.
not clarifying the hat your wearing in a question, and thus it's confusing me who is asking this question, the Advisory? or Martin the current Project Director of OpenRefine? If I'm a user, and part of the community, do I have a say or can vote somewhere on allocation of funds that OpenRefine the project holds (through it's fiscal sponsor)?