I want to shed some light and raise awareness about what's been going on with NumFOCUS.
This is a long post that I started writing in late February. The basic gist that I am trying to get across is that
-
From the perspective of many sponsored and affiliated projects, NumFOCUS has
been struggling to meet their needs in an adequate or timely manner. At a
Town Hall meeting in February, NumFOCUS announced it is moving in a new
direction, which caught many by surprise.
-
Over the years, NumFOCUS has lacked transparency in how its board is
selected, had a mixture of early-resignations as well board
members staying well beyond term limits, has struggled to
incorporate a
European affiliate for 9 years, and is currently overdue in
providing minutes for the second half of 2023, or any part of
2024.
-
NumFOCUS initiated an effort to run an election for open
board seats and proposed changing
its governance structure.
-
Related to 1 and 2, some projects are considering and actively pursuing
alternative venues for fiscal sponsorship.
I have been in touch with many members of the community, including a
half-dozen former and one current NumFOCUS board members, to get their
perspective, which I include below. I welcome your corrections, clarifications,
and thoughts.
You can join the discussion on
LinkedIn,
Mastodon,
Twitter (most of the responses are on the
LinkedIn post).
Outline:
Several weeks ago (February 12, 2024), a new direction was announced at a town
hall meeting.
This public development unfolded over the background of several years of private
discussions among NumFOCUS affiliated projects about the efficacy of NF in
serving the needs of constituent projects.
In the Town Hall meeting, there was some acknowledgement of pains in the way NF
currently operates, but not specifics as to what those pain points are nor what
the plan is to mitigate them. It was therefore surprising to learn of the plan
to form a 501c6 in addition to the 501c3 while navigating these
(underspecified?) headwinds. >> skip to 501c6 section >>
NumFOCUS Executive Director Leah Silen outlined some of the challenges related
to forming a European entity, though I was alarmed to hear about 17 accounting
firms not being sufficient to arrive at a suitable accommodation. >> skip to NF
Europe section >>
There was also a theme of AI, which is not representative of interest or
relevance to every project. "AI" was mentioned 37 times, according to the
transcript.
It wasn't clear if this is a new direction for NumFOCUS as a whole, if it is
related to and somehow bundled with the 501c6 move, or if it's just an
announcement of direction for the Open-Source Science initiative that's a joint
partnership between NF and IBM. (This does not have its own section, but does
get mentioned in the feedback from former board members and community
members)
Finally, the last concern raised for me was around a proposed election and
change in governance structure of NumFOCUS. >> skip to the Elections section >>
At the conclusion of this post, I link to some alternatives to
NumFOCUS >> skip to the paths forward section >>
I posted on mastodon,
linkedin,
and twitter:
Anyone else have concerns about the proposed new direction of NumFOCUS? I
finally watched the recording from Monday’s Town Hall and I’d love to talk /
read your thoughts, be it in public or in private.
In response to my feeler about concerns, here's some of what I heard back.
One former board member wrote this:
I guess it would come as no surprise that I have some concerns. A few include
-
Misdirected AI thrust.
-
Repeated claims of funding the projects, without mentioning overhead taken
from project grants.
-
Emphasis on organization & personnel growth, instead of focusing on existing
service delivery.
-
Complex organizational restructure, when services are not being rendered
effectively. New structure separates current board from technical board;
risks isolating projects further.
-
501c6: new opportunities for funding (potentially good), but NF has no
current demonstrated route other than SDG[] to get funding to projects, and no
related policies in place.
-
Board elections: the committee solicited will not control next election of
board? Board should have more community representation.
-
Board is in contravention of bylaws (president, e.g., has been on the board
for a year longer than allowed).
Another former board member said:
I do have concerns. Unfortunately from my past and current experience with
NumFOCUS, I don’t see a lot of ability to influence change
A third former board member wrote:
I have a confession. I never ran any grants through NF because I didn't trust them.
A fourth former board member wrote:
It has been many years since I have been on the NumFOCUS board...When I was on
the board - strong personalities generally drove much of the direction. ... At
that point there could have been more engagement with community and projects,
but I am saying this with the wisdom of looking back (ah hindsight, if only we
had you sooner).
A community project leader wrote:
The new proposed governance structure seems to come out of the current
board/staff without any input from anyone from the projects (that I know of)
and as [redacted] mentioned the new structure may not really help with getting
the community together
Another community project leader wrote:
I also found it underwhelming to say the least… It even annoyed me on the AI
take. I thought we wanted to push science and open source, not please one
specific board member and the investors. Yes, to some extent, our projects are
the backbone of AI, but they presented this initiative as if the AI business
was going to drive what we do in our projects. And the bot thing… come on.
Instead I would have liked a back to basics. Science and open source. Focus on
that, providing the services they should be already providing for all the
money taken. And instead of randomly saying AI, talk about what real science
and expertise we bring to the table vs all the BS models out there.
A third community project leader wrote:
I personally have a bias against 501(c)(6) NGOs. Seems to be inappropriate for
publicly funded and public-interest scientific software. I understand why they
are doing this experiment, and it may "work", but it will have real governance
consequences.
A fourth wrote:
Within all the buzzwords and stuff, it took them about 70 minutes to mention
scientific computing or science (and even that was a read out loud one of the
zoom comments) I think that summarises it all where the actual priorities lie
and that "projects first" is a well sounding but absolutely empty phrase
without any actions to support it.
A fifth wrote:
it's clear to me that NumFOCUS really signed its own death warrant with that
town hall. So the question is where to next. Things that have been spitballed
in our various conversations:
- start a new non-profit
- start a co-op
- find a different sponsor
- take over NumFOCUS
More private communication:
I have so many thoughts on NF, but so far I have been sharing them in small
support groups only. Basically after this Monday mess I think it's hopeless to
fix it, and we may better look for another nonprofit who actually does the
accounting and paying project bills on time.
currently the projects seem to serve pydata not the other way around even
though the marketing says the opposite.
Anyway, after the townhall I kind of lost all the last drops of hope I had
that everything will work out eventually as there was not a single point that
showed a positive change from the current status quo.
One of the people first people who reached out to me was Executive Director Leah
Silen, but I was trying to piece something together in writing (this post) and
concentrated my line of inquiry with her around the election and election
committee, so her responses are quoted in the election section.
Current board member Logan Kilpatrick, also reached out on February 20th, 2024
saying "Happy to chat about your NumFOCUS feedback!" but did not respond after I
wrote about my concerns. Logan holds the position of Secretary on the NF board,
so had he responded to me, I could have followed up to ask about why the board
has not released meeting minutes for the past 11
months, but I
did not get this opportunity.
I also emailed Sylvain Corlay, a current board member I know personally from
our long time shared involvement with Jupyter, and he did respond, I am
including some of what he shared with me in this post, starting with
clarification about what I referred to as "underspecified headwinds":
Regarding the pain points that were encountered, I believe that Leah was
referring to complaints from projects regarding the slow processing of
financial service requests by NumFOCUS. I think that a lot of these issues
have been addressed, especially after the recruitment of Miriam, our new
finance director.
In my opinion, the growth of NumFOCUS in recent years has presented us with
the typical challenges that any organization encounters during growth.
NumFOCUS deals with a high level of detail on the accounting of projects
(down to the individual travel expense, and regular financial reporting on
grants etc), and the number of affiliated projects has grown from a dozen
to over sixty. The way in which you can operate when you have a dozen
sponsored project and when you get closer to a hundred is not the same -
and the way to address this question required systemic changes - such as
adopting better tools and processes - which understandably took time to
implement. I think that we are better equipped now, and Leah presented
plans around adopting new tools, notably a ticketing system for financial
requests.
(A side note: While some frustration was understandable, I think that some
of the criticism received was unfair. The consolidated accounting that
NumFOCUS provides for all projects is more complex than it may initially
appear, as I can attest as a business owner.)
Because I also asked about the pervading AI preoccupation at the Town Hall,
Sylvain responded to that:
I don't think this is very central in our plans for NumFOCUS, but several
people have said that they felt that the PyData ecosystem and NumFOCUS had
"missed" AI.
There's more from Sylvain in the 501c6 and NumFOCUS Europe sections.
NumFOCUS origin story
NumFOCUS started as an organization in 2012. Here's a snippet from the NumFOCUS
history page where I just correct one inaccuracy,
the part about Anthony coming up with the NumFOCUS name, by crossing it off:
In the early Oughts, the open source scientific computing community was
reaching a critical point of maturity for Numeric/Numpy, IPython, Matplotlib,
and SciPy. By 2010, a critical mass of projects were in need of a more formal
structure to provide support and help to organize the community.
…enter NumFOCUS!
Travis Oliphant (author of NumPy), Fernando Pérez (author of IPython), Perry
Greenfield (author of Numarray and Astropy), John Hunter (author of
Matplotlib), Jarrod Millman (release manager for SciPy), and Anthony Scopatz
(who came up with the name "NumFOCUS") became the founding board of NumFOCUS
Have you ever wondered why FOCUS is capitalized? The name came from Travis
Oliphant in January 2012, in a thread he started with a dozen
people[]
whose subject was "New Foundation Name?" After a few of us tossed in some
initial ideas as well as desirable properties of the new name, Travis pitched
the following :
Foundation for Open and Usable Code for Science -- or
Foundation for Open Code Usable for Science (FOCUS)
which Anthony Scopatz suggested be modified:
+1 with the following modification "Foundation for Open Code for Usable
Science." There are many codes "usable for science" but very few that make
science more transparent and usable.
A few days later, Travis followed up
So, what about NumFOCUS for the name of the foundation? Initially it will
represent "NumPy Foundation for Open Code for Usable Science" But, later the
Num can just represent anything relating to Numerical Computing.
Unless there are strong objections (or better alternatives that emerge in the
next few days), I think I will go ahead and start the legal process with this
name. I will give another 3 days for other ideas to emerge, then with the
help of legal zoom start things going.
There was some assent, and no alternatives or opposition, so Travis moved
forward with the plan, reporting that "NumFocus, Inc." was formed as a Texas
non-profit corporation a week later (January 14th, 2012).
Travis Oliphant and Peter Wang also founded a company at the same time,
Continuum Analytics, which later renamed to Anaconda to reflect and capitalize
on the recoginition of its popular Python distribution. Again back to the
NumFOCUS history page
Continuum Analytics (now Anaconda) provided integral support on many levels
during the early years of NumFOCUS. This included space for the first NumFOCUS
office, support staff, and salary of the Executive Director. They also
launched the first PyData and contributed many resources and funds to the
early events which made it possible for event proceeds to directly support
NumFOCUS.
So NumFOCUS, from inception, has had some form of corporate sponsorship. The
executive directory mentioned is Leah Silen, who has been the executive
directory of NumFOCUS for as long as NF has had an executive director. Being a
501c3 non-profit allows individuals and corporations which pay taxes in the
United States to donate to NumFOCUS and deduct those donations on their tax
returns. There was a period of time where there was some notion of "becoming a
member" of NumFOCUS though donation as an individual, but that has gone away,
though there is still a way for corporations to get perks for donating, for
example, if they donate $50,000 dollars or more, they get a seat on the
Advisory Council.
When I first found out that NF proposed forming a 501c6, alarm bells started
going off in my head, because of the reputation of and my experiences with
another 501c6: The Linux Foundation. And by a happy coincidence, I had just
stumbled across a pithy and apt description of what's wrong with the Linux
Foundation.
For the impatient, I include Rob Landley's words from the clip above, but I
recommend the original source video for its superior delivery:
The Linux Foundation was formed when two black holes of bureaucracy combined
to form Voltron of Bureaucracy. ...and when they combined, the focus shifted
from maintaining this standard, to asking donors for money.
Linux Foundation has a well deserved reputation for being pay-to-play. It's
where vendors with big pocket books send money. Rob Landley has a more a more
meaty post explaining the LF situation in
2010
...the Linux Foundation has set itself up to translate between Fortune 500
companies and individual hobbyist developers. And it's very good at talking to
Fortune 500 companies, because that's where its money comes from. But it's not
very good at talking to hobbyists, because it's a giant bureaucracy, which is
the antithesis of hobbyist "playing around with stuff".
...The Linux Foundation tries to influence and monitor Linux development, to
provide results for the corporations that fund it. It sponsors conferences,
writes white papers, maintains a technical advisory board... It's a bit like a
modern Usenix, really.
Around that same time, I was a member of the Linux Foundation (2010-2012) - I
was young and naive. I thought it was amazing to have an organization that
includes individuals: a grad student tinkerer like me, along with professional
developers who get to work on the Linux kernel full-time. After seeing Jim
Zemlin, the Linux Foundation Executive Director, give a talk at Xerox PARC in 2010
using a Mac and making excuses how Linux isn't quite there for doing
presentations, which clearly demonstrated what total corporate shill he was,
especially given his "vision" for Linux was that a) it was already everywhere,
and b) in the future, it will be more everywhere. I thought that things
could turn for the better, it was a temporary accident that someone both
dismissive and vacuously bombastic about Linux was leading the
Linux Foundation. I was wrong. Zemlin is still the LF Executive director
now.
Rob Landley had a much closer view of the Linux Foundation transformation:
Oh I worked for them back in 2007. (The Documentation fellowship.) There was
some definite frog boiling going on there over the years, they got more
bureaucratic as time went on. The purge of all hobbyists from Linux development
didn't happen until... it wasn't until 2013 they started asking "do we still
have any hobbyists in this community, what IS a hobbyist
anyway?"
And then ignoring the replies
Michael Crusoe pointed
to a post by Matthew Garrett from 2016 titled Linux Foundation quietly drops
community representation
How a 501c6 differs from a 501c3
A 2016 post by Eben Moglen (that
Rob Landley referred me to) contains this explanation:
The Linux Foundation, which was formed by merging OSDL and the Free Standards
Group, is a trade association, which is a special form of legal entity under
US tax law. It is not a charity, or a public service organization. It’s an
association of businesses, paying dues, in order to achieve common business
purposes, which in the case of LF results in a wide range of activities, all
centered around promoting the success of Linux. Because it does not pay
federal income taxes, and its exemption—like those of charitable or public
benefit organizations—comes from section 501c of the Internal Revenue Code,
lay observers might suppose that it has some “community benefit” function, but
the precise opposite is true.
The tax-exemption rationale for trade associations is that their primary
income is the dues paid to them for achievement of business purposes. Since
that expenditure would be a business expense netted against revenue for the
member businesses if they performed the same tasks individually, there is a
sharp disincentive to group together for common business purposes unless the
dues are also untaxed in the hands of the recipient. It is axiomatic to their
identity that trade associations aren’t charities, that they only benefit
their donors (as opposed to 501c3 tax exempt charities, which must not benefit
their donors specially), and that they pursue business goals, not social
interests.
NumFOCUS Board member Sylvain Corlay explained this about the 501c6
On the subject of the 501c6, some projects expressed disappointment that
NumFOCUS was not actively engaged in fundraising on their behalf. While we
offer assistance with grant proposals and fund small development grants,
there is no dedicated effort to secure additional funding for projects such
as Jupyter. This is something that we want to be more deliberate about.
A successful funding model employed by other open-source foundations, and
which requires using a 501c6, is a membership model for companies, as
exemplified by the Linux Foundation. This model provides revenue recurrence
and aligns well with building a relationship with regular donors. (It also
matches well with how large corporations are used to engage with such
open-source foundations.) Finally, such a membership model scales really
well compared to a grant-based funding model.
I think that the 501c6 direction was the wrong one for NumFOCUS to pursue. The
reason is that we have a nonprofit, that was created to serve the public good,
now transforming itself to also serve the needs of the business community. I'm
not against someone wanting to set up a 501c6 for scientific open source
projects, I just think that NF doing this, without consulting projects, given
how much dissatisfaction there has been with NF on their core services they're
supposed to provide projects, is particularly
treacherous[].
To project the LF situation into our ecosystem, the hobbyists there are the
academics here, if you squint. And if scikit-learn, one of the breakout
superstar projects, can't get help from NF to get a credit card so they can run
CI with GPUs for months at a time, it'll only get worse when NF starts to
consider businesses who pay NF real money and expect real service as a 501c6.
Like it'll be Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc, as "members", and sure,
you and me will be "members", too, I'm sure we'll all be treated equally.
You can click on the image above, but I also reproduce the text from a
scikit-learn developer posting on the NumFOCUS slack #general channel in October
2023:
So from the scikit-learn side, we started the process of trying to get a PEX
credit card in May so that we can pay for GPUs in our CI.
After some discussions, we filed the form in June for the card, and I put my
info there as for the name on the card.
Now, being October, apparently the account requested for me is on hold or
blocked (talking to @Mir Mueller
about it), and my guess is that it's because my name sounds too middle eastern for the bank. My nationality on the request is not even Iran, I'm using my German nationality to request it, and it's still blocked (for now at least).
With conversations with many members of the staff, including @Leah Silen I've
been asking for a European entity since 2019 at least, and I think NumFocus
now does have a European entity, which AFAIK is not used. The reason I've
asked for it has been two folds:
- donors can deduct donations from their taxes if they're in Europe and they
donate to a European NGO kind of entity.
- we can fund and financially deal with people who come from countries against
whom US is very hostile, like me.
In the context of diversity and getting people from the global south, it's
also important that we could actually do that, and it's not just all talks.
Believe if or not, it's really not fun to have to deal with such issues and
after 4 months still not be able to have a simple PEX card. For people like
me, it would be really nice if we could actually deal with the European
entity, and have our dealings with that entity instead of having to deal with
the US system. So the question is, how can we get to actually do this and
what's needed for it to happen?
The mention of "asking for a European entity since 2019 at least" is a good
segue to the next concern.
From the board meeting notes for December 1, 2014 (page 50 of NumFOCUS Meeting
Minutes
2014-2015)
Moving forward to establish NumFOCUS as a charitable organization in Europe as
a Dutch “foundation” to receive donations from European entities at a cost of
$1,500.
And a note on the same page:
France has more potential members?
- However France is worst place to set up
Fast forward to 2024, and the "What is our status in Europe?" comes up again at
the Town Hall, at 1 hour and 2 minutes into the
recording
(passcode is NFtownhall2024-12-02 )
These are Leah Silen's quotes from the Town Hall:
Boy. This has been so much more of a challenge than we ever could imagine.
this, as soon we had the bank account. Everything set up, we decided to go the
Volunteer Association in France that was established over 2 years ago.
Then mentions difficulties in getting an accountant and a bank account set up...
We're also looking at other countries now to move forward. The other country
we initially had thought about setting up a organization a branch in the
Netherlands, and we are. We've got all our documentation about halfway
finished with that. "
3 people working on this right now. So I think. I think Miriam reached out to
like something crazy like 17 accounting. And financial firms in France, mostly
in Paris. And literally, yeah. Haven't gotten a response back. So we're
working on it. And if this doesn't work, we're we're not gonna yeah, we need
to pivot and come up with a different plan
This is where things stand 9 years later.
Actually, turns out there's even been a bit more progress. A current board
member, Sylvain Corlay, who joined the board in 2018, provided some more context
in an email to me on March 1st:
When I joined the board, I was really keen on pushing forward the subject of
building the organization in Europe - however there was a lot of resistance in
the beginning about it on the NumFOCUS board...
Momentum was lost for personal, professional, and later pandemic reasons.
So we had lost the initial energy to get this done. We are back on pushing
this subject because having EU-based operations would be very beneficial at
many levels for NumFOCUS.
An unforeseen challenge arose when we discovered that non-EU individuals
cannot have admin access to French bank accounts. To address this, we have
partnered with a bank that grants both myself and Didrik[] administrative
access, while US-based individuals have "accountant access" to view all
transactions.
In our search for an accounting firm, I initially hoped to engage the same
firm that QuantStack uses. However they declined because they did not work
with nonprofits. (Typically, voluntary associations do not employ accounting
firms). NumFOCUS staff reached out to multiple accounting firms without
success. However, in the meantime, we managed to get the accounting firm that
we use for QuantStack to agree to take this on, and to give NumFOCUS a hefty
discount on their rates. So we are now moving forward
So there's some progress here, and that's good news. It's too bad that there's
no way for anyone to know this, because the board has not released meeting
minutes for the past 11
months.
After I made my post following the Town Hall, Leah Silen reached out to me to
talk about my concerns, but I had not yet synthesized my thoughts. In my reply to
her I decided to focus on just the elections, expressed interest in the Election
Committee, and asked about how many seats will be getting filled, and based on
Leah's reply, the plan was that there would be four seats.
I followed up, wondering if the intent was to have the board shrinking to seven
member, as I believe Logan Kilpatrick, Rosie Pongracz, and Larry Gray are the
only board members who are not over their term limit, or are some board members
who are over their term limit intending to stay on the board longer.
Leah replied
Because Katrina and James are officers, their terms are ending in July. We
wanted to give the 4 new members who will be elected as soon as possible an
opportunity to take advantage of their organizational knowledge and not
have a majority of the board brand new at one time. We'll be holding
another election in Q3 to fill these slots and fill any others required to
move to the two-board structure - Technical and Administrative Boards.
How could Katrina Riehl and James Powell terms be ending in July if they are
both over the term limit for serving on the board? They both began serving their
terms in October 2018 [] , each term lasts 2 years, and there's a
possibility of renewal for an additional term, so 4 years later - back in 2022,
should have been when their board tenure ended.
I understand the appeal of this approach, it's a "nice to have" for
institutional knowledge to be passed on with overlapping board transition.
Abiding by the bylaws of the organization, however, should be "non-negotiable".
What does it say about the integrity or priorities of an organization that is
willing to allow board members to continue to serve on the board, in violation
of its own bylaws?
Each director shall hold office for a two year term with an option to renew
for an additional
two year term, for which he or she is elected and until his or her successor
shall have been elected and qualified or until his or her earlier resignation,
removal or death.
I am opposed to this plan, and find it problematic. A possible resolution would
be to have current board members who are over the term limit, but are wishing to
continue to serve NumFOCUS to do so by joining the Advisory Council.
Article 5 Section 2 of the NumFOCUS
bylaws
state that
The Board of Directors may, by resolution, establish a council of advisors
(the “Advisory Council”) to be comprised of one or more individuals chosen
by the Board of Directors at its sole discretion. The Board of Directors
shall not be bound by any advice or decision of the Advisory Council. The
members of the Advisory Council shall not have the rights or privileges of
directors as set forth in these bylaws and shall have no power or authority
over the operation of this corporation. A member of the Advisory Council
may be removed at any time by the Board of Directors with or without cause.
There's a small and seemingly shrinking set of volunteers who stepped up to help
with the coming election. This github
repository has a link to
the meeting
minutes,
and the issues contain
discussion of what's being worked on.
In some way, this whole post, and specifically this Elections portion of it,
is among my contributions to Issue #5: communicate context to
community.
One of the reasons the elections committee is shrinking [] and having trouble
making progress is because of a moving of goal posts. I guess I haven't spoken
to other members of the elections committee about this, but that is one of the
reasons I'm having a difficult time trying to engage on the elections front. As
a concrete example, at the third meeting of the Election Committee (March 18th),
Leah informed us that there would be seven seats in the upcoming election,
instead of four, because the Board and Executive Director decided to move up the
previous plan to split the board into administrative and technical boards to
this upcoming election. I asked if the bylaws have been changed, and was told
that they will be. But there's no way for anyone to know this, because the
board has not released meeting minutes for the past 11
months.
In May 2014, there was a post from Andy
Terrel
describing that
The current board was elected without terms kept in mind. While we love all
our board members, we realize that a rotating board has many advantages. Going
forward we would like to have yearly elections with each board member elected
to a two year term. By alternating between half the board being elected each
year, we will have a fair amount of overlap to keep the day to day affairs in
order. Board members will not be limited to a specific number of terms.
At some point, the "half the board being elected each year" idea fell through,
and was revised to allow the board member to renew for a second term without
an election.
In 2018, there was an announcement of an election for the board.
I ran for a seat, along with 24 other people, and took a look at the bylaws and
found that it wasn't really an election, because the new board members would be
elected by the current board, per the bylaws. I suggested they change the word
"election" to "endorsement" - because the input the board was seeking from the
community was not actually binding in terms of who would get to be on the board.
That change was accepted by Andy Terrel.
I made my suggestion on August 3rd. A blog post from July 20th announcing the
election was edited, such that it appears now that this was always called an
endorsement,
but that change could not have been made until at the earliest the very last day
of the Nomination period. Andy acknowledges after the board is selected:
In hindsight, we should not have used the word “election” anywhere, as many
assume that the candidates with the highest vote counts will automatically be
selected. We needed to apply a selection step in the process to ensure the
resulting board had diversity, members willing to serve as officers, and the
right mix of background and expertise to lead a rapidly growing non-profit
organization.
The July 12, 2018 NF board meetings include the following plan for the election
- Election process?
- Nomination process; any member can nominate.
- Voting by all members in leadership positions → to be defined in detail, e.g. 5 hours a month of community work.
- Consensus ratification (can include possible adaptation for diversity, community representation, etc.)
- Come back to this process by email. Nomination email end next week. Target voting date: end of August, one month before Summit.
But then the board, in announcing "election" results only said who was added to
the board, and not the results of that endorsement (née election).
What they did
announce was
that "212 out of 763 eligible donating and volunteering members submitted
endorsements", and that of the 25 candidates, twelve received more than an
arbitrary 5% of the vote, which made the board deem them as "finalists", and five
new board members were selected from among these finalists.
I tried to cajole board members (both then current, and then incoming) to
release this data to the public, and though some were sympathetic, they as a
body did not budge and kept it under wraps and out of scrutiny.
Here are some excerpts of me trying to convince board members to release the
voting totals in 2018.
From an email thread with then board member Andy Terrel:
I think the trouble with the current outcome is it's completely opaque: it
feels like a backroom deal.
I assert that any reason behind not releasing the numbers should be outweighed
by the benefit of being transparent and honest about what happened. This
applies equally in terms of reflecting community input, and in terms of being
able to see if and how the board incorporated that information into their
decision making process.
The board made some decisions, but there is no way to evaluate, scrutinize, or
analyze that decision due to the absence of information. It may be
uncomfortable that a prominent member of the community received too few, it
may be uncomfortable that the someone with a wide level of community support
was "passed over" for a board position for someone with less support. But
whatever the realities are, they are just that: real. And we can have
uncomfortable conversations if need be, or change the process for the future,
but let's not sweep it under the rug. The current optics of the situation are
that the board feels it knows what's best, made some difficult decisions, but
does not wish to have any oversight or accountability for those decisions.
I'm very glad you wrote up the post reflecting the
challenges
with this process, this is a good thing and let's not stop there. Whatever
challenges we have, we can only face them if we are honest about them. As
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote over a hundred years ago: "Sunlight
is said to be the best of disinfectants."
From email thread with then board member Lorena Barba:
I disagree that I am seeking answers where there are none. I am seeking
transparency and clarity for what that broad-brush fuzzy indication of
endorsement actually looked like. I do not think it is appropriate to keep the
community in the dark about the actual totals.
I am not seeking justification for the board that was selected. Nor am I seeking
to challenge it in any way. It already has been
acknowledged
that the process had its challenges and could be improved in the future, but
those of us out of the loop cannot help improve it without understanding the
facts about how it went.
From email explaining to Matplotlib lead developer Tom Caswell what likely transpired:
according to the minutes from August 27th - the advisory council provided 5
candidates recommended for positions on the board, and one to be added to the
advisory council. The Board met and did just that on the 29th:
https://numfocus.github.io/numfocus-board/2018/20180827/
But the advisory council also recommended that the vote totals be released,
and were left with the impression that they would be. That's where things
stood until the board met to do the selection. I'm inferring that since Peter
Wang was the one proposed to be added to the board, it is most likely him that
has a high number of votes that was passed over for a board position. I don't
know why that is, but I do know it's not healthy to sweep that under the rug.
I can speculate it may have something to do with the fact that Peter is still
CTO of Continuum (Anaconda) while Travis is no longer there. It might also be
the fact that Peter did not put any effort into his candidacy explanation
paragraph. Who knows, but the point is that the Advisory board made the
recommendation that I can only assume was followed but without following the
numbers disclosure aspect. Uncomfortable though it may be, when there are so
many doubts looming over an organization, not releasing those numbers and
being tight lipped about it does further damage. Trust is being eroded.
So that was how the election went down in 2018.
All organizations evolve, and board membership changes are expected. But you
might be surprised to learn that two NumFOCUS board members resigned last year.
It's true, Noa Tamir and Stéfan van der Walt resigned, I think in October. I'd
point you to the board meeting minutes that documents this, to make sure I had
it right, but the board has not released meeting minutes for the past 11
months,
Those two weren't the only ones who've resigned in the past. Here is what some
of the former board members had to say about their decision to step down.
One former board member explained :
I resigned, and what it came down to was that I could not put the time or
emotional energy into working to make NumFOCUS the organization I wanted it to
be, instead of the organization that it was...
The conflict in NumFOCUS between what I wanted (which is hard to narrow down,
but I guess could come back to the idea of the student researcher being a key
audience) and what would eventually make NumFOCUS more engaged with the
communities with which it was already familiar (i.e., "data science,"
industry, etc) was getting harder to navigate. ... So when I resigned, it
was because I was overwhelmed and not able to put in the effort that I wanted
to -- but the reason I felt like I had to put in so much effort was because I
felt like the organization was slipping further and further from what I wanted
to see as its core mission.
Another former board member wrote that :
When I was on the board, I and others talked with many people who we thought
had any kind of power to change things, and nothing changed. So this is not
the first time, or probably even the second.
And when we video chatted added:
I left the board because I couldn't affect change.
A third former board member wrote me that part of the reason for their resignation
was that :
I and others on the board had grave concerns about performance, but that no
one seemed to be held accountable for that.
My operating plan for making this post was to try to capture the various
NumFOCUS transgressions as a way to illustrate why staying there is unlikely to
work, given how many years and board members have churned through there, all
while keeping the same executive director. Or that staying with NF will require
a great deal of energy to keep the experience for individuals and projects
from going sideways further. But a concern I have is that, aside
from caring about the scientific-adjacent open source community, I don't
actually have a need for an alternative to NumFOCUS to exist. I do not have
any grants and no plans to apply for grants, so I worry about trying to put
in a bunch of effort to stand something up while the people who actually
have the grants figure out a better alternative for themselves (or just bite
the bullet and stay with NF).
In responding to my email Rob Landley included this piece of wisdom:
Anyway, you don't "fix" stuff like this, the tree falls and a new tree grows in
its place from a sprout
There are those who think that trying to reform NumFOCUS is a lost cause.
Here's someone who's given up on trying to influence NumFOCUS, but also
saying that it would be too much effort to create a new nonprofit.
NumFOCUS was founded to serve the needs of this community. I don't think many
of us have the appetite of going through that process again, and there are
options.
Some of the people who asses a low probability of success for a NumFOCUS
turnaround nevertheless also think that a more responsive NumFOCUS would be the
best outcome.
You can join the discussion on
LinkedIn,
Mastodon,
Twitter (most of the responses are on the
LinkedIn post).