[Experiment] Informal communication channels for the Jupyter Executive Council

[choldgraf]

We'd like to run an experiment at defining two communication channels where the @jupyter-governance/executive-council can informally communicate out what they've been up to:

Zulip:

• #Announcements in Zulip as a cross-project place to make announcements. Try to keep these short - post in Discourse and link there.

Discourse, for asynchronous and lengthier posts:

• The #governance/executive-council channel to tag announcements from executive council members

Guidelines for using these channels

• We encourage anybody on the @jupyter-governance/executive-council to use these channels to communicate our progress, major updates, etc from the executive council or the jupyter foundation
• When doing so, you're not making a "formal" communication from the executive council, but you are communicating with some privilege as a member of the executive council.
• 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.
• Other leaders across the Jupyter community are encouraged to use these channels for similar purposes (just keep it focused on stuff internal to Jupyter).

Experiment questions to answer

We should revisit this after October 2025 and ask questions like the following:

• Overall, does this feel like a good mechanism for increasing transparency and communication from the JEC?
• Does this decrease the perceived friction for JEC members to communicate externally?
• Does this lead to more overall comms from JEC members?
• Does this make it easier for others in the project to learn about updates from the JEC?

[jasongrout]

Chris, I added a due date of October so we remember to revisit here. I also took off the "needs triage" label since clearly an EC member knows about this :). I also added it as an FYI to the EC agenda next Tuesday.

[jasongrout]

On discourse, I see the #announcements tag being used a lot already (>200 posts). How are you thinking the announcements category is different from the announcement tag?

I would have thought it would be a bit more natural in the current system to have an EC category (since categories seem to roughly correspond to areas of Jupyter) and use the existing announcements tag.

[choldgraf]

@jasongrout do you want to brainstorm this a little bit on Tuesday? My thinking is that #category would be the "kind of communication" (e.g. "announcement") rather than the "topic of communication" ("jupyterhub"), but I don't have a clear answer in my head.

• On the one hand, I want to encourage more cross-project visibility. It feels like having a top-level "Announcements" channel would be a good way to encourage that (and encouraging tags by topic, e.g. jupyterhub).
• On the other hand, you're right that the "announcement" tag already exists and people are using it.
• And either way, we need a place for the JEC to communicate - where would that be otherwise?

A quick anecdata: the Rust user forum has a small number of top-level categories that are mostly based on "type of post" not "topic". They do have an "announcements" top-level category.

This Discourse post about how to use tags also seems interesting.

Having typed this out, I guess what I'm realizing is that our current system feels like it is leaning against the principle of "have as few categories as possible". It implies that every new sub-group or working-group in Jupyter should get their own top-level category...so I guess the question is whether we work within the current system or try to improve it...

[jasongrout]

@jasongrout do you want to brainstorm this a little bit on Tuesday?

Yep, happy to brainstorm.

so I guess the question is whether we work within the current system or try to improve it...

Yep, agreed. We just need to be clear about the direction we are going.

[choldgraf]

A few guiding principles for this

We discussed a few guiding principles to drive this forward in today's JEC meeting, with the goal of balancing more fluid and frequent conversations against the risk that public communication can also have unintended negative side effects:

Principles to keep in mind

• 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: need to be cleared with LF events (timing of those may be held closer to the vest to make a splash and aligned with LF marketing timelines.

[willingc]

You may want to consider having the governance announcements be a separate category from general announcements.

[choldgraf]

Yep @jasongrout mentioned something similar in the JEC meeting yesterday. Rather than creating a project-wide announcements category, I'll plan to re-work this in to a JEC-specific category.

More context here: #128 (comment)

[choldgraf]

OK I've made the following updates:

• Governance is now a top-level category
• Executive Council is a sub-category under governance

I didn't create SSC and JF categories just because I didn't want to set an expectation that they'd be monitored without consent from either the SSC or the Foundation Board. I'd be a strong +1 on adding them, I just wanted to keep this to the minimal change that would open up a channel of comms for the JEC.