Rejoining the NumFOCUS Board

A few weeks ago, I was elected to a new term on the NumFOCUS board. This time it is the Admin board while a newly created Technical Steering council has also been formed. One can see some of the differences of the two group on the election webpage. This group is different than before where being on the board really meant, "Make sure the org is working." With so many different responsibilities there is a greater need to split the tasks.

Why re-join the board

I've been thinking why I joined the board again. I had been on the board from 2012 - 2021 and felt at the end that I had spent all I could on the cause. Since that time I've seen several businesses I had been working with fail and took a "normal" job at NVIDIA. NVIDIA has a lot of great perks, but the one that seems to have brought more spark to my life is the adage, "Do your life's work." Well helping scientists make tools for discovery had been my life's work up until I left Anaconda to pursue various applied ML startups. Even my work at NVIDIA seems less meaningful when I'm not focused on helping scientist use our technology. I don't know why but science has always been a calling.

It would be naive to say that was the only reason I wanted to rejoin. There has also been a bit of a challenge with watching the board from the side. Various events have led me to believe that the organization has lost touch with the community that put so much time and effort to build it. The classic story of serving more than one master. In this case it is very hard to know exactly what went wrong, but it was clear with Jupyter's exit that projects have started to feel less happy with the arrangement. My hope is that I will be able to bring back the spirit of the early days, but the truth is that it may be that the world has just moved on.

First week back

The first surprising thing to me is that the new board is only supposed to meet once a quarter. I'm skeptical that this will work out super well. The first task is to define strategic direction and the second is to profide fiscal oversight. It will be very difficult to know how the organization can structure itself strategically if reports are only once a quarter. I've been part of the Advisory Council which has a nebulous duty of giving advice but gain no right of a director, or be required to be heard (see bylaws). To be frank, the advisory board seems to be a thing where a bunch of folks are updated on things going on but I don't think there has ever been time for a lot of discussion.

The board met as a joint group for the first time where we had a few tasks, one was to elect officers and another to approve the code of conduct working group members. It was unclear to me how we would do either of those tasks as this was the first time the group had ever gotten together. I proposed we find a single temporary chair to handle the Technical Steering committee officers, as the Admin Board already has elected officers (not sure if those are changing). It was mentioned that the board will have a retreat in a few months, so a few of us volunteered to help organize that. If both the Admin Board and the Technical Steering Committee are incharge of setting strategic direction, the retreat seems a good way to get folks working on the same page.

Okay I'll keep it short for now. I would like to start blogging more about NumFOCUS and the community. We'll see how that goes.