Tripal User's Meeting 2019/03/12

Tripal Governance

Why? We are getting pretty big and are receiving many contributions (great!). With these contributions we want to ensure the integrity of Tripal is maintained, while also ensuring everyone has a say in the direction of the project :-) We also want to coordinate funding and ensure we are working collaboratively and as a unified community.

See Current Governance document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iRGmZzKnAm8c5Q9yYLiTctSJaRqnT6Bm0eix1uzoTxw/edit?usp=sharing

Discussion

• How does this document get accepted/rejected?

  • Send this out to the whole community

  • If no rejections within 1 week then we will consider it accepted

  • Submit a PR to the Tripal documentation and leave it open a week

• How to amend

  • Amendments should be done through PR? We will leave this up to the board once it’s formed

• How is the chair chosen?

  • Elected within TSC. Voting by entire community probably not necessary (but may be needed to select initial chair).

• Do you like this proposal?

  • No serious objections from call attendees

• Start in on the specific discussions on the document

  • What is Tripal Core? Multiple Repositories (essential) or simply the github/tripal/tripal repository

    • Bradford feels github/tripal/tripal is the core

    • Resolved as github/tripal/tripal

    • If we would like to go beyond tripal/tripal then a docker instance would be a good way to formalize this structure

  • What is the authority of the steering committee?

    • What happens when the TPMC unanimously feels against the decision of the Steering committee

    • Ethy feels the TPMC should be the authority on fine-grained code-related details where the steering committee should have more authority on long term goals and steering

    • Meg errs on the side of let the TPMC be the final say since they are the ones who have to write the code

    • Resolved: the advisory board acts in an advisory committee

  • Responses kept to github?

    • Bradford agrees  we won’t be able to get everyone to respond on github in timely email

    • Ethy: copy emails into the github discussion. We need to ensure people have a github account

    • Bradford: if they don’t watch the issue queue but are subscribed to the steering committee group then they we will get the emails notifications

    • Meg: steering committee won’t be watching the full issue queue but hopefully the chair will facilitate the use of github/slack. Having email/slack/github will get overwhelming so we need to consolidate so the chair will need to ensure the channels of communication are working

  • Too much responsibility on the chair

    • Delegate! And elect a vice-chair if you need

    • The first steering committee can revisit this once they see how it’s working

    • Ethy: we don’t want to over-specify roles within the steering committee to ensure that those with the best skills for a job are able to step in. This works best through delegation

  • Internal stakeholder meeting first and then an external stakeholder meeting after

    • We want to see what the committee consists of

    • Lacey: we have to remember that our internal members may end up more high level then some of our external members (e.g. an external technology expert is interested in low level code decisions whereas an internal PI may not)

  • Proposal development:

    • Please look at the document! This is a new discussion and we need/want input!

Action Items:

• Ethy to clean up any redundant information DONE

• Lacey to make a PR to add governance document to the the official Tripal documentation

• Next meeting have an official vote for members/chair