Propose a maximum of 15 steering council members

[maxrjones]

We currently have 13 steering council members, which is great for getting a broad set of voices in the meetings and decision making process but also challenging for scheduling the planned quarterly meetings. I propose that we set a maximum of 15 steering council members to prevent unbounded challenges in communication and meetings.

[abarciauskas-bgse]

👍🏽 LGTM

[rabernat]

Fine with me. Personally I'd go even further. My feeling is that the governance we invented for Pangeo (originally copied from the Jupyter governance, which Jupyter has since changed heavily) is not really serving us well. It's too heavy handed for the relative small size and informality of Pangeo. Pangeo is currently missing an "executive" function: an individual or small group empowered to take action on behalf of the project without having to run every action through a 15-person council for discussion and approval.

But that's probably a topic for another day! 😆

In the meantime, yes, we should definitely cap the steering council size.

[maxrjones]

Fine with me. Personally I'd go even further. My feeling is that the governance we invented for Pangeo (originally copied from the Jupyter governance, which Jupyter has since changed heavily) is not really serving us well. It's too heavy handed for the relative small size and informality of Pangeo. Pangeo is currently missing an "executive" function: an individual or small group empowered to take action on behalf of the project without having to run every action through a 15-person council for discussion and approval.

But that's probably a topic for another day! 😆

In the meantime, yes, we should definitely cap the steering council size.

I'd be in favor of addressing this now. I felt the lack of an executive function when trying to sort out the implications of the new sponsorship policy for the post-AGU event and subsequently in conversations with NumFOCUS. I think this has also been reflected in Matt's comments on the website refresh about hesitancy over taking action and other people's confusion over follow-up steps after the what's next conversations. For my needs, I worked around this by just taking actions and communicating very openly, with the assumption that someone would call me out if I were overstepping. But I think a formalized executive mechanism would be much more sustainable.

IMO the Executive Council from Jupyter's governance could be pretty simply adapted as a first pass at what's missing for Pangeo. I'll open a PR so we could at least make a more concrete decision to not talk about it now by closing the PR, if that's what we want to do. Update: After discussing with Aimee I'll wait until after the SC meetings to open a PR depending on the action items