Team operations and practices

Team operations and practices#

How decisions are made#

The Jupyter Executive Council follows the Decision Making Guidelines described in the main Jupyter governance documents.

In short, we’ll first seek an informal consensus. If a clear consensus cannot be reached, an active council member can call for a vote. The voting process then follows the guidelines laid out by the Jupyter Governance model.

Process for adding meeting minutes#

We use meeting minutes to communicate our major conversations externally, with the goal of providing transparency to the Jupyter contributor community. Public minutes can added as long as two JEC members have looked at them (the author, and one other person).

After JEC meetings, any JEC team member should summarize the main ideas of our discussion. Try to be short and to-the-point. Make a pull-request to a file in the meeting_notes/ folder.

Any other team member is encouraged to merge that pull request.

Where we communicate#

Internal communication#

For private synchronous team communication, we use a private channel in the Jupyter Zulip.

External communication#

The JEC is piloting an experiment to encourage more informal external communication from JEC members. Below are the general guidelines we’re following, see this issue for updates: https://github.com/jupyter-governance/ec-team-compass/issues/127

We use two places for informal external communication. All JEC members are encouraged to use these channels regularly:

Anybody on the JEC should use these channels to communicate our progress, major updates, etc from the executive council or the jupyter foundation. Bias towards transparency and sharing out!

These are generally read only. We don’t expect any post authors to monitor their posts and respond to questions. However they can if they’d like.

Guidelines for our team communication#

  • Trust one another to use their best judgment. We trust other JEC members to act in good-faith with the goals of the entire JEC in mind. Our bias is towards more communication, but be mindful about unintended consequences.

  • Speak up if something makes you uncomfortable. We should feel comfortable telling one another if a kind of communication made one of us uncomfortable. This is strongly encouraged! It’s the only way we can learn how to strike the right balance as a team. If communicating publicly makes a JEC member uncomfortable, we should respect their concerns. We can always revert or remove communications if need be.

  • You’re speaking as yourself, as an EC member. You’re not making a formal communication from the whole EC, but you are still representing a position of privileged access to information and authority because of your role. If you do want to communicate “on behalf of the EC”, make this explicit.

  • Don’t surprise people. Don’t communicate something if you think another JEC or Foundation Board member would be surprised (particularly in a negative way) if it were communicated.

  • Focus on “closed loops”. The primary goal is to communicate our incremental progress as the JEC. Focus on communicating things that are “decided” or “complete”, and not as a way of informally getting feedback on in-progress conversations.

  • Don’t communicate to have leverage in discussion. Our goal is not to use these communication mechanism to influence JEC decisions that haven’t yet been made. Be mindful that public communication can be a way of driving discussion in a particular direction, and don’t use this kind of communication to that end. If the JEC wants feedback from the broader community, we should do that intentionally as a group.

  • Give attribution: When communicating out work from the JEC or the Board, give credit to the people that provided the most leadership and work on the effort.

Examples of in-scope and out-of-scope topics#

We don’t have hard rules for what is in-scope, but here are a few examples we brainstormed

  • Appropriate topics

    • Calling attention to public communication that was made in the voice of the EC or Foundation, such as posting public minutes, public announcements of funding, etc.

    • Posting about conversations EC is having that would benefit from community input

  • Not appropriate topics

    • In-progress topics that are not resolved, where public communication is mainly a lever for applying pressure on other members of the EC

    • Event announcements that haven’t been coordinated with LF: these need to be cleared with the LF events team. We often wait until specific dates to announce events in order to align with their event roll-out plns.

Code of Conduct#

The Jupyter Executive Council follows the broader Jupyter Community’s Code of Conduct

Contents