Dear all,

welcome to the pysemtec mailing list. \o/ \o/ \o/

Content of this mail:

1. Organizing a first online meeting
2. How to use this (and other pysemtec) mailing list(s)?
3. How to handle governance in this group?

1. As written in the invitation, the goal of this group and

communication medium is to enable and to foster the cross-project exchange and collaboration in the field of python-related semantic technology.

To get this community started I would propose an online meeting (between week 47 and 49) where every participant has max. 5min screen-time to answer, e.g., the following questions:

• Who am I?
• Which kind of problems do I deal with?
• What are my projects?
• What software do I use?
• What kind of software or features or docs I am missing?
• Which ideas and expectations for the community do I have?

This might take 20min-30min. Then, I guess, there will be questions and topics for discussion, which might also take 30min.

As I hope for the community to grow further, I think it would be nice to archive the self-presentations (on a voluntary basis) on the pysemtec website. That way future members can get an idea who they are communicating with. Therefore, I suggest for the slides to use a markdown based solution as https://demo.hedgedoc.org/p/rVWLZGAtR#/ (scroll down to see and edit source code) as this simplifies the compilation to one html file later.

What do you think? If there is enough positive feedback the next step would be a date poll.

Is anybody interested in helping in preparing this meeting? :)

2. I think we all are get more mails and messages then we feel

comfortable with. However, here we are on a new mailing list. Naturally, some question arise: How many mails (per week) are acceptable for us? Should there be a separate list for detailed discussions of particular interest (e.g. discuss@lists.pysemtec.org) while this list here is reserved for a few important messages? Is email the appropriate medium anyway or should we rely on another one (chat? reddit?)?

I think, the current number of list members (7) is small enough to solve such questions simply via the mailing list itself. If that turns out to be too cumbersome, I would switch to a polling method, however.

3. Experience shows that communication among people can lead to

conflicts and frustration and that such situations can significantly harm the activities of a community. If such a situation arises it is typically too late to establish problem solving mechanisms (because they might be rejected as 'biased' etc.) Therefore, I think, it would be wise to establish a basic consensus about how this group is governed (i.e. how it governs itself) in the initial phase.

In particular, I suggest the pysemtec group (i.e. every participant) self-commits to the official python code of conduct [1] (directly where it is applicable and mutatis mutandis elsewhere).

For group-wide decision making there are two considerable models: (a) benevolent dictator (as practiced until 2018 in the python community) (b) voting based democracy. While I would prefer (b) (probably in the vein of [2], or even fully consensus oriented) I could also live with option (a) for some time. This model – with me as (hopefully benevolent) dictator – is the current de-facto situation anyway as I control the domain and the mailing list server.

[1] https://www.python.org/psf/conduct/ (Python Community Code of Conduct) [2] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0013/ (Python Language Governance)

My goal is, that the pysemtec group becomes an active and "low-maintainance" community and that some kind of election scheme can be established next year or so. For now, when most people do not know anything about each other and the group yet has zero achievements it would imho be overkill to already establish a formal governance structure. So, I try to find a good compromise between keeping the noise level low and finding out and implementing the preferences of the community.

Of course comments, improvement suggestions etc. on all of these issues are very welcome. Please deliberately decide whether to send feedback off- or on list.

Best, Carsten