Community Committee Meeting (2026-06-10)¶
Please add new agenda items under the New agenda items heading!
Attendees¶
April
Jason
Matt
Name
Action items¶
...
Standing items¶
Active initiatives
Workshops!
Welcome Mat?
Upcoming initiatives
...
Agenda & notes¶
Would it help us stay accountable to our tasks if we met every week?
Changed meeting to 30 minutes every week (2nd half of the current slot)
Should this team take on the Distinguished Contributors process?
A long time ago, we mistakenly conflated “good at jupyter” and “leader/more responsibilities”. That led to the distinguished contributor program to recognize those “good at jupyter” folks without saddling them with extra responsibilities.
Distinguished contributors vote for new distinguished contributors
Worked well, except most don’t participate in the vote. Usually falls on a handful of individuals to run the election.
Changed the election process over time.
When this was first created, there was a huge backlog of people who’d made large contributions but had no formal recognition. 5 years in, we’ve gone through that backlog. There’s an expectation that the same volume of people will be voted in. In reality, we haven’t been onboarding enough community members to justify that number. If we have less new contributors but add the same number of distinguished contributors per year, we’re lowering the bar and devaluing the program.
Last year we reduced the volume from 10 -> 5. Some people suggested 2-3 per year.
Broader pattern of changing a minor detail of an existing process requiring too much work, and then the change doesn’t happen.
Cash prize: Nobody was in charge of making sure the payment went out. There are people who are waiting a year for payment. We haven’t thought through the systems to administer the process.
At NumFocus, this was a more established process, hasn’t been updated for LF.
Goal: think strategically about why this program exists, what its objectives are, if it’s working. Run the program and decide whether or not to kill it. Suspect some people think this program is not accomplishing its goals.
April: What kind of challenges might we run in to if restating the purpose of this program?
What is it meant to do? Recognize, disentangle recognition from responsibility and formal leadership status. Put some “teeth” behind recognition ($500 cash prize in the early iterations of the program). Having a prize associated with it increases the perceived professional value of the title.
Who thinks it makes sense for us to own this?
Jason
Matt, but worried about capacity (+1 April on capacity)
April
Chris: Wants to see groups like JCB make funding requests to manage capacity. What’s the point of Jupyter Foundation if not to pay for this kind of stuff?
Matt: What’s the process to ask for money?
No formal process except for CFP. Set up a dedicated repository github
.com /jupyter /council for communicating with EC. Created 2 issue templates, one is a funding request template. It’s not a formal process, but you can get the conversation started this way.
Chris: Not sure action is needed now. We just announced this year’s distinguished contributors.
Jason: We need to follow up with awards from last year.
Chris: Suggest we not take that on. EC is not asking us to take on administration now, but to take on authority to decide what to do with the program.
Martha: I think Naomi said she can do the administrative stuff
Website!
Context on actionable current conversations about the website?
Chris: Nothing new.
Jason: Marketing committee discussing moving the blog from Medium!
This morning, had a good debate about the future of the blog.
All agree, not Medium.
All agree, stays at blog.jupyter.org
Wordpress (managed by LF) vs static blog?
If we do LF-managed, create a separate docs site more community-driven management
Matt: Wordpress :nauseated_face:
Do we hire someone to holistically improve the website? Or just focus on the community part?
Chris: We both have to deal with the information design problems, and technical problems over how we generate/host the website.
The information design is more important, but we get bogged down in the technical stuff.
When people try to solve the information design problem, they need to have status to speak authoritavely on behalf of the project. There have been multiple weeks-long arguments about this.
Whose goals are we trying to accomplish with jupyter.org?
Marketing committee (media strategy WG)?
JCB?
There’s an open PR to add a new dropdown to the website to expose more subprojects. Just copying the same thing from the footer to the top nav. Promote Jupyter as a collection of subprojects
Chris: Want to merge!
Do we want to own the website?
Jason: yes
Last website redesign there was a dedicated group of CalPoly students working on it who came up with a cohesive redesign that was a big step forward.
Chris: 18-month redesign project that didn’t make it as well.
Chris: We keep making perfect the enemy of the good. My strategy has been to just merge pull requests that are reasonable and tightly scoped (“it takes two to tango”)
April: light no. Our job is supporting the community, not marketing. Joint ownership with marketing?
Should do a funding request for a product person who can take requirements from these two stakeholders and generate a list of achievable changes to the website
Matt: April’s argument resonates with me.
Jason: What we can do is define the purpose of the website and parts of the website. E.g. “this is the responsibility for the front page”. This can guide a contractor or LF to start redesign.
Martha: The marketing team should do the same thing in parallel. This would illuminate differences, identify sticking points between marketing and community, and then the next step is consolidating / negotiating these priorities.
Jason: I don’t think the Marketing committee has the space for this. They’re focused on just the blog. Could do a 1-page thing, but not a full study.
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Workshops
Ask for money in CFP to support continuation of workshop program
April: Can we ask Celeste to ask for money and skip the CFP?
Jason: We need to quickly turn this around.
CFP comes out sometimes between now and end of month
Then we would run the call for workshops.
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