Steering Committee - Meeting Minutes and Decisions

[binste]

We'll use this discussion to document decisions taken in meetings of the Vega-Altair Steering Committee. Everyone is welcome to provide inputs by replying to the individual discussion comments. Top-level comments are reserved for the minutes.

[binste]

2023-08-25

All committee members were present:

• @joelostblom
• @mattijn
• @jonmmease
• @ChristopherDavisUCI
• @binste

Decisions and next actions

All decisions were made by consensus. No vote was necessary.

• @binste will act as steering committee chair. The responsibilities include organising committee activities such as meetings and votes as outlined in CHARTER.md. He will record decisions and next actions in this GitHub discussion
• Vega conference:
  • We plan to give the following lightning talks, although they are subject to change:
    • @binste: altair_tiles
    • @ChristopherDavisUCI: How he uses Altair in education / Heatmaps in Altair & Vega-Lite
    • @jonmmease: vl-convert
    • @mattijn: "Algebra syntax"
  • We plan to give a general update on the state of Altair. @jonmmease will share a link to a Google Sheets deck based on a previously prepared lightning talk. It's planned that the talk will be given by the committee members who attend the conference in-person. We currently aim to provide updates on the following topics with the person preparing the slides tagged next to it:
    • Recent features in versions 5.0 and 5.1 @joelostblom
    • Governance structure and code of conduct @binste
    • Roadmap @jonmmease
  • Version 5.1 release
    • We still want to include Add ppi argument for saving and displaying charts as PNG images #3163
    • Release planned for Monday. Release manager is @mattijn
• We are considering to apply to become a Numfocus sponsored project. This idea will be further discussed at the Vega conference after which we plan to take a decision on this. Next application deadline is October 15th.
• @binste will organise the next meeting for a date after the Vega conference

[joelostblom]

If I have time to put some slides together, I think I'm going to try to give a lightning talk about altair_ally as well, or at least the motivation for having functionality like that available in Altair. I would have wanted to spend more work on ithe package first, but maybe it's good to just discuss the ideas and get input at this stage.

[binste]

Agree, it's a great opportunity to get inputs and I'd definitely be interested in hearing more about altair_ally! I have the same goal with the altair_tiles lightning talk and I think it's totally fine if the package requires more work.

[binste]

2023-10-13

All committee members were present:

• @joelostblom
• @mattijn
• @jonmmease
• @ChristopherDavisUCI
• @binste

Decisions and next actions

All decisions were made by consensus. No vote was necessary.

• We exchanged impressions from the Vega/Altair conference which took place in September. Based on this, we decided to not yet apply to become a NumFOCUS sponsored projects and first continue the ongoing discussions with the maintainers of Vega and Vega-Lite on a potential joint governance model including an overall steering committee. See also discussions happening in Governance for the Vega Organization .github#2.
• @binste to organize the next steering committee call where we decided to also invite core Vega and Vega-Lite developers for the purpose of continuing this discussion

[binste]

As a follow-up to this meeting, the committee decided unanimously to add the https://github.com/altair-viz/dash-vega-components project to the altair-viz organisation and place it under the same governance structure.

[binste]

2023-11-28

As decided in the meeting from 2023-10-13, we used this call to discuss a potential joint governance model with Vega and Vega-Lite. For this purpose, @jheer (Vega) and @domoritz (Vega-Lite) joined the call. All Vega-Altair committee members were present except for @mattijn.

Participants:

• @jheer (Vega)
• @domoritz (Vega-Lite)
• @binste
• @joelostblom
• @ChristopherDavisUCI
• @jonmmease

Decisions

Decisions are preliminary until @mattijn approves as well. @mattijn could you please indicate your approval/disapproval of the points below via comment to this post? Of course, happy to elaborate further if you want or catch up in a call. We tried to take your view into account based on past discussions.

• We will establish a steering committee for all Vega projects including Vega-Altair. This committee will replace the current one for Vega-Altair. Members of the Vega-Altair steering committee become members of the new committee.
• Each project, e.g. Vega-Altair, can continue to have maintainer meetings to discuss project specific topics such as cutting a new release. The steering committee will deal with big picture topics.
• The new steering committee will meet in a cadence of initially every 1-2 months. Later on we might switch to a lower frequency.
• Communication/discussions/decisions will continue to happen on GitHub so that they are public. More lightweight coordination can happen via Slack.
• @domoritz and @binste will act as committee chairs
• Regarding the NumFOCUS application, there is a general consensus that this is worth pursuing for Vega-Altair. If NumFOCUS is ok with it, it would be great to join as a unified Vega organisation as features in Vega-Altair will often depend on modifications in Vega-Lite and Vega -> Would be great if we can direct funding to the relevant project and not just to Vega-Altair. No decision was made if we want to apply already in January.
  • For the application, and to make it easier to collaborate across projects, the participants discussed the idea again to move Vega-Altair into the Vega GitHub organisation. This can be picked up in a future committee call. We'll need to think through how to solve redirects from current Altair documentation to a new one or if we want to keep the current repo just for the documentation.

Next actions

• @domoritz: Create PR to move steering committee content from Altair to Vega level: Consolidate governance documents in Vega Organization #3277 and Governance for the Vega Organization .github#2
  • @binste: Ensure that Altair docs page is also updated accordingly
• @domoritz to reach out to Jake regarding permissions on GitHub and Pypi as well as to seek inputs on potentially merging GitHub organisations.
• Next meeting to be scheduled by @binste and @domoritz once new governance structure is in place. For agenda, see point above about merging GitHub organisations.

[mattijn]

I approve!
Happy to join the discussion about potential merging of repos. This has been discussed before without reaching consensus.

[binste]

Great to hear, thanks for the prompt feedback. And yes, these discussions should definitely continue with you onboard! Joel already recounted a bit a previous conversation you had. It's probably good to devote a next committee call to this to talk through it in detail.