21st January 2025

Notes for the first meeting of the Technical Steering Committee.

January 21, 2025

Attending: Juan Nunez-Iglesias, Tetsuo Koyama, Sanket Verma, Wolf Vollprecht, Jacob Schreiber

Executive Director: Leah Silen

Not attending: Eloisa Elias, Sophia Yang

Agenda

• Vote for admin representative, chair, and secretary
• Decide on Small Development Grant program recommendations
• Decide on transition to Zulip
  • Juan's proposal: https://hackmd.io/QRcXQK-WQGmfmtmt8lLoVA?view
• Discussion about social media presence
• [POSTPONED] Sponsored project reviews
• [POSTPONED] Budget review by Leah

Minutes

• SDG discussion

  • Program review by SDG committee, summarised in Google Doc. This doc is currently private but it or a summary will be made public.
  • Doc discusses many proposals, including:
    • eliminate grants altogether and instead provide “dividends” equally to all projects (this was proposed a few months ago by Juan)
    • smaller proposals evaluated by an open community process - different funding pools including big development grants and multi-year grants
    • paid reviewers
    • random selection
  • Doc recommends moving to random selection
  • TSC discussion focused around this and the dividend option. Ultimately voted to implement committee's recommendation, with some clarifications.
    • max $10K/y

• Transition to Zulip

  • TSC discussion:
    • Pros:
      • Open software
      • Aligned with NumFOCUS mission
      • Web-public channels increase transparency
    • Cons:
      • Community cost of transition could be high – extra work when Slack has not yet pulled the rug on NumFOCUS.
        • but transition under tight time constraints when/if they do could be more painful
      • Yet another chat software
    • Contested vote but ultimately transition was voted in.

Resolutions

• Nominate Sanket as Admin representative

  • Motion by Juan
  • Seconded by Jacob
  • 5-0-0 (For-Against-Abstain)
  • Passed

• Motion to nominate Juan Nunez-Iglesias as Chair

  • Motion by Jacob
  • Seconded by Wolf
  • 5-0-0
  • Passed

• Motion to nominate Jacob Schreiber as Vice-Chair

  • Motion by Juan
  • Seconded by Tetsuo
  • 5-0-0
  • Passed

• Motion to nominate Sanket as Secretary until July 2025

  • Motion by Juan
  • Seconded by Wolf
  • 5-0-0
  • Passed

• SDG:

  • Jacob: Motion to pass the recommendation of the lottery system with limits on amount received per year ($10K) and suitable weighting for projects that apply below the threshold so they are not penalised for applying for smaller sums
  • Juan seconds
  • 5-0-0

• Zulip: Juan passes the motions to adopt Zulip as NumFOCUS's primary chat communication platform

  • Jacob seconds
  • 3-1-1 (For-Against-Abstain) (Juan, Sanket, Tetsuo-Jacob-Wolf)
  • Motion passes