TWG Definition/Roles. Call for feedback/ideas/refinement

[Bob_Carpenter]

@seantalts

it’s interesting that you were at one point TWG Chair and had pretty strong opinions that it needed to become a Director position with actual power when you resigned.

That is an accurate report of my opinion at the time. Since then, I have changed my mind, flip-flopped, reversed course, and now hold the opposite opinion. Specifically, I think we should move to the tech lead role being a “chair” in the Apache sense and viewed as a facilitator for consensus and as a last resort, someone to call for a vote if things can’t be decided by consensus.

@syclik

One concrete weakness I see in the proposal is that it’s focused on tie-breaking rather than encouraging consesus-seeking.

I don’t know what decisions ultimately need to be forced past a 50/50 vote.

The idea is absolutely to seek consensus, and only when that fails seek a vote. And I don’t mean someone saying “I would do it differently,” but more “I am willing to put the work in to do it differently and here’s my counterproposal.” There’s a lot written about this in all that material floating around on open-source decision making.

To take one example, when I objected to the way the stanfit objects are designed and presented a counterproposal, I was not willing to put in the work on PyStan and RStan to code them the way I want. So I have to let that go and let other people build them in ways that to me seem to violate fundamental principles of software design in languages like C++ or Java. Nevertheless, I wanted the chance to express my objection rather than facing a fait accompli.

@seantalts

Which is the plan for the current roadmap doc, so I guess that it’s been more of a chair-style tenure so far.

How can there be a chair if there’s no committee?

I also think this whole plan is complicated with an entire roadmap at varying levels of granularity going up. I’d much rather see this legislated in small, independent pieces. I have to vote on it all or nothing as is, which puts me in a difficult bind if I want to vote my actual opinion and I want the project to not be stalled.

@seantalts

I still read the original post as giving TWG-creation authority to the SGB

This was the thing that annoyed me the most about being “TWG director”—that there was no notion of what the group was supposed to be. I didn’t want to be running a large committee.

@seantalts

I also would like to see like a concrete spec for what @Bob_Carpenter is proposing -

Sure. Could you send me two things so I can get a sense of the level of detail required:

1. the rules for how the TWG and its director currently operate—the only thing I’ve seen is this post by Breck.

2. Your proposal for how things should work going forward.

@seantalts

“rough consensus” is not specific enough for my very concrete mind.

So what did you mean by “rough consensus” when you used it in the roadmap doc (my emphasis)?

@seantalts

Stan 3 Roadmap Update - Interface Edition

This roadmap document is partial, describing only what we could get rough consensus on in a meeting with most of the tech leads at the end of June 2019.

Anyway, let me be clear now and say that I do not want to sit in a room and hum and let the chair play decibel meter and decide if we have rough consensus. I would strongly prefer a fixed threshold (1/2 or 2/3 seem to be reasonable thresholds).