Improving Transparency: Advisory Committee's Role and Community Involvement

[Martin]

@abbe98

I'm arguing the open source project need a model driven by code contributors, not that the entire ecosystem or community needs to be governed by developers.

You are making an interesting distinction between the open source project driven by code contributors and the broader ecosystem/community. I'm interested in exploring this further, particularly because OpenRefine is part of a much larger ecosystem, including reconciliation services, extensions, libraries, and users integrating OpenRefine into their operations.

1. Where do we draw the line between these two groups?
2. How is the open source part of the project governed?
3. Who are the code contributors? Do we include developers, designers, and technical writers, grant Principal Investigator?
4. Does the Advisory Committee and CS&S represent the project or the community?

@abbe98

@thadguidry

To be fair and accurate, @antonin_d was hired because of grants to help OpenRefine largely add a feature that many users have asked for, that of large dataset support and he's delivered that in my testing and kudos to him. That 4.0 project is not his own, but instead a contractual obligation back to our community and users. Does that make more sense?

I assume it's a contractual obligation with C&S and the funder, it's definitely not with the community or the other developers(lot's previous discussions on the topic).

Actually, it's the opposite. Antonin was already the project maintainer before the EOSS applications. The grants for reproducibility, EOSS-1 and EOSS-5, were written by Antonin. The Advisory Committee at the time (Thad, Antonin, and myself) approved the grant application to go through CS&S because we saw it as an opportunity to secure his position with the project while adding long-requested features. We had a similar process for our other successful grants (NFDI and Wikimedia-related), where the grant Principal Investigator reached out to the Advisory Committee to operate the grant via CS&S. The last round of unsuccessful applications (EOSS-6, Mozilla Infrastructure, and DEF) was my initiative. I realized that I should have consulted better with the community before taking those initiatives.

As we are fundraising to cover 2025 (OpenRefine 2024 Barcamp: Presentation of OpenRefine status), the advisory committee and I have allocated funds for a part-time developer to support the developer community as outlined in Grant opportunity: Open Technology Fund - #5 by Martin. This person will not be responsible for delivering new major features or making architectural changes. So far, we have received limited feedback on this plan from other contributors. We plan to move forward with it, as we believe that having a dedicated resource to maintain the project is crucial.

Looking at what made previous grants successful, I believe the application should come from the community, and the Advisory Committee/CS&S should provide the structure to administer them. If CS&S is not the best place to run the grant, it could be well executed via another organization.

During the BarCamp, we discussed the idea of creating community goal posts to identify contributors and users who are interested and to pool resources such as time, funds (via grants), and expertise. I am very enthusiastic about implementing this idea.

@thadguidry

If you could highlight areas in Godot's governance which you like or dislike

@thadguidry I would be cautious using Godot as an example, since they have a larger community (7,500+ contributors on GitHub vs 350 for OpenRefine) and their governance addresses different challenges (for example they left their fiscal sponsor)