Jupyter Community Building Working Group meeting minutes

[jasongrout]

In the JCB, we've decided to try a lighter-weight process to publishing notes from our meetings. We'll add a comment to this issue, then periodically copy these notes into our meeting minutes doc in this repo. This gives us:

1. A lighter-weight process for publishing meeting minutes, which hopefully means it will get done more promptly.
2. The same record preservation that we had before of minutes in files in this repo, which can be cloned, published, etc.

[jasongrout]

15 Oct 2025

• We should start up public meeting minutes again! What if we started having a github issue instead of a full file on github? Might be a little simpler
  • GH issue comments are faster but harder to preserve
  • What if we just periodically copy comments to a file? Remind ourselves once a quarter (Jason is excited enough about archiving that he commits to push the file periodically)
  • We could have a bot that moves stuff from comments -> file?
    • Talk to Matt about automation he’s happy with
• Jupyter Community workshop update
  • Note: a workshop is only finalized when it has a venue and a date (not just when we’ve funded/agreed) - let’s see if we can get them all finalized ahead of Jupytercon so we can mention workshops in the talk
  • Ask for updates from Deb either fortnightly or monthly
  • Deb planning to have workshops finalized by Oct 29? (there is some schedule for finalizing things, though we also don't want to stress the organizers out unnecessarily)
    • Let’s announce workshops at JupyterCon?
• Initiatives
  • DEI Committee Ideas List
  • Community health stats
  • The four recommendations from https://ec.jupyter.org/Jupyter_Community_Building_Survey_Report_2024.pdf
    • Recs 1 and 2 are being pursued
  • Helping onboarding:
    • Guidance for community scaffolding. How to make a good team compass? What are good team practices? How do we align our vision? What should we document and how? How to run good meetings and help new people become facilitators?
      • What things should every community have?
      • WHY are we doing each of these things?
      • April: reminds me of fluency assessments of agile methodology
    • We really like the idea of time-boxed, focused intentions across all communities; “Season of X” or “Month of Y”
      • For instance: this month everyone sends us their team compass (and we tell them what a compass should be, maybe?) and we build a list of them all, next month we coach anyone who wants help on meetings, and publish some great meeting resources, etc.
      • We need some permanent artifacts from these initiatives!
        • Top-level Jupyter docs? https://docs.jupyter.org/en/latest/
        • Blog posts?
        • Community-specific docs?
        • JCB team compass: https://ec.jupyter.org/reports/communitybuilding/readme/
        • Community page: https://docs.jupyter.org/en/latest/community/content-community.html
          • Can we take more ownership over this part of the top-level docs?
      • Potential initiatives
        • Meeting Facilitation - how to host a dev meeting. How to facilitate a roadmap meeting. What kinds of meetings subprojects have and how to facilitate these
        • Team compass - policies & practices
        • Team compass - recording meetings notes (and automation), and decisions (decision records)
        • Decision-making, prioritization and roadmaps
        • Onboarding and welcoming newcomers (overlaps Team Compass)
        • Statistics a subproject can gather (documentation viewing stats, etc.)
        • List of subprojects and team compasses
        • Helping subproject (official and unofficial) leaders network / communicate / share with each other
        • Reaching out to your users, building ongoing feedback relationships
        • Software documentation (4doc, diataxis)
        • Succession planning (coaching subproject leaders on how to replace themselves)
        • Organizing subgroups (working groups?) within your community for progress in specific focus areas (and identifying the important focus areas?)
        • Managing the “firehose” of community feedback while still making productive executive decisions
        • Dealing with insufficient capacity to meet community needs
        • Mentorship skills. How to start mentoring relationships. How to prioritize mentoring activities.
        • Dealing with negative interactions or code of conduct issues
        • Open source and your mental health (see Yuvi Panda’s talk “You don’t need to contribute more to open source, you need to go to therapy”)
        • How do unofficial “subprojects” make themselves known?
• How to balance / subdivide our work?
  • Sub-working groups?
  • Individuals stepping forward and stepping back based on the current time-based initiative (see above). E.g. Martha leading software documentation month, Matt leading mentorship month, April leading capacity month, etc.
  • Should we move to fortnightly meetings?
    • Yes, our next meeting is in two weeks.
• DEI merger
  • Talk to Kirstie Whitaker!!! Has lots of ideas!