Board members will need to know what they're getting into. @lsilen I think that we're relying on you for this (let me know if this isn't something you can do and I'll try to find someone else). My hope is that this isn't a very heavy lift, and is probably just a few bullet points that you write down casually.

We'll likely run the election with some web service. There are a few out there. Someone (I think @lagru ) is investigating.

@lagru can I ask you to share whatever information you learn here, along with whatever initial recommendations you have? My guess is that you'll look at 2-5 different tools, summarize them including what you do and don't like, and maybe share your thoughts on what 1-2 you think would work especially well for us.

Hey folks, what is the right mechanism to recruit community members to join this committee? Can we add a CTA in the readme? Is there a Google form to apply to join?

I think that right now the plan is something like the following (taken from Board Election Procedure 2024:

• Solicit nominations for board members
• Close nominations and review
• Share results with current board, get their input for a final slate of nominees
• Send out applications to nominees
• Application deadline
• Election starts
• Market election, build up good participation among voters
• Close election and review results
• Share with board
• Publish results

A lot of the work here is also likely to be disseminating this information to the correct voting parties and annoying them sufficiently to ensure sufficiently high participation.

Am I missing anything here?

Edit (by @pavithraes): I've removed the dates from this first comment. Please see the latest comments on this issue for the most recent timeline.

In this doc I'm seeing a "combination of the previous two" section at the bottom.

Are people ok with that section? I have minor quibbles but in the interests of moving on I'm ready to move on. If anyone has major issues please raise them here. In a couple days if there's no major concern I think that we call it done.

We need to write an email for the NumFocus community to let them know about the call for nominations for joining the board of directors, with information about the board, how to nominate and relevant deadlines. If we want to post this also in social media we probably need a shorter version.

I have started this document

There's more relevant information about this in #4

From the Board Election Procedure

• NumFOCUS community members will be invited to submit nominations for open board positions. Individuals may self-nominate or nominate someone they feel would be an asset to the organization.
  Draft Nomination Form based on the 2021 form - The introduction needs to be rewritten, and the questions reviewed/edited.
• NumFOCUS Community Members will be defined as all Individuals who have opted in to receive the newsletter, our member and affiliated project lists (sent to project leads who are our NF contacts or, in some cases, the project’s leadership committee), members of NumFOCUS committees, and those on the current events mailing list.
• Nominations will be open for one month.

Stuff we should do

It seems like we make a simple Google Form (or similar) publish it to various sources (the newsletter, social, word of mouth) probably a few times, and then wait a month.

My hope is that the lift here isn't that hard. Here is an example form submission (I just spent five minutes making one, we can probably do better than this if we want).

• Get some people to review the form above
• Publish form and background on various channels
• Re-publish
• Re-publish

Places we can post things

• Newsletter
• Numfocus Mailing list
• Twitter / mastodon
• Slack
• Prominent projects and their discussion locations (example Pangeo has a discourse forum)
• ... (help add ideas here)
• .

Bonus points for places that we think would help us build a more diverse pool of candidates.

In order to start elections I think that we need to:

1. Explain what's going on #5
2. Create some sort of form for nominations
3. Broadcast the explanation of what's going on and the form to all relevant parties #4

We're on a clock here. Current board members would like to roll off. We haven't yet had much momentum, but we could! What can people commit to?

@lagru can you push #5 to a point where we're proud and think that it'll do a good job converting people?

@jaspajjr if we're ready to go do you think you could lead the charge on broadcasting things?

Are other people in the committee able to push this forward?

Hi Everyone,

Thank you all for your efforts. However, my sense is that this attempt to organize elections isn't functioning well and is unlikely to succeed with the current direction. I think that it's time for NumFOCUS to try a different approach. I'll include some observations and recommendations for a next iteration below.

One Election

I would focus on running a single election, rather than on trying to form a committee. We lost a couple of weeks on organizational minutiae that (in my opinion) were not important to the critical path and burned momentum.

Besides I don't think we have enough knowledge today to know (or care) about how best to create a multi-year committee like this. There's a lot of learning ahead of NumFOCUS I think.

Execution vs Perspectives

The committee had a dual goal:

1. Give external perspective on the election in order to avoid bias and improve legitimacy
2. Execute the election

These are very different goals, and they probably need very different groups of people. In order to avoid bias / improve legitimacy I think that you want a broad set of people to observe and weigh in from lots of different backgrounds. There also isn't much work required or coordination here, so having a big group isn't harmful.

However, In order to execute an election you want a small group of people who have all committed to doing work, and who already work well together. They should all be in similar timezones and it's probably ok if they think pretty similarly (broad perspectives are useful here, but not as useful as above).

For the rest of this I'm going to focus mostly on execution, because that is what I personally was focused on

Committee selection

The process here was an open call "do you want to be on this committee?" and all were accepted. I recommend a different approach.

At the very least for execution I recommend that we at least set an expectation of work. I think that historically the SciPy conference asked "How many hours per week are you able to work on this project?" which was a good filter. I'd say that the election is likely to take ~5 hours per week for a few weeks. Some committees are about talking. Some committees are about doing. This is a "doing" committee and people need to opt-in to that early on.

Additionally, I could imagine other configurations here to finding a set of people to execute the election:

1. Pay a group that does this professionally (do these exist?)
2. Nominate a single Czar to do it (it's actually not that much work, the challenge is trying to coordinate many people to do that work together) and give them a lot of control (it would be very frustrating to do a bunch of work that is then judged by people who don't do work)
3. Engage one of the various professional services groups in our space (Quansight? Quanstack?) to execute the election. For a professional group doing something like this is trivial.
4. Have one of the projects / conference groups run things? They already know how to work well together.
5. Have NumFOCUS staff run this (although this would make me nervous for bias reasons)

Communication thoughts

This is subjective and many things could work

In our particular configuration we had three places to talk about things:

1. Slack
2. Github
3. Zoom meetings

Personally I was happy with our choice to use Github (even though it failed in the end). Probably we should have chosen one of Slack or GitHub though. Communication was diffuse.

In hindsight we should have had a regular zoom meeting (tangent: even though I dislike these). Doing a Doodle poll every meeting was bad. Also, trying to do this across all timezones was bad.

Recommendation

I'd ask Quansight to do it if they're game. Pitch it to them as a good marketing opportunity. They've been in the space for a long time, are pretty well trusted, and have a strong vested interest in NumFOCUS's success.

This doesn't solve the legitimacy problem, but that should maybe be solved separately from execution (perhaps invite project/meetup leaders to assess the work).

I'm out

Anyway, to make things explicit, I'm no longer planning to do work on this effort. If there's some official way to step down as chair then I'm doing that now. I've already communicated much of the above to @lsilen and @dutc .

If other people who were active in this effort have thoughts or constrictive critiques or suggestions I encourage them to voice them here and maybe whoever comes next will be able to learn from that experience.

Thanks all for your trust. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to deliver.

Cheers,
-matt

We're going to start taking actions (like #4 ) and we probably need to make a place where people can go to learn about what's going on, the objectives, the process, etc..

There are a few ways to do this:

• A blogpost somewhere
• The README of this repo
• A page on numfocus.org

Probably any one of these is fine. We should then publish that thing, and then also link back to it in everything that we send out.

@pavithraes I think that you're thinking about this right now, so I'm assigning you (but feel free to push back if that's premature)