Asynchronous decision making in the Turing Way Community by the SC

[Arielle-Bennett]

Following on from the conversation in #4316

I wanted to share some additional questions which have popped up for me about how our new @the-turing-way/steering-committee should encourage/respond to this type of community work. We had already been discussing how to make decisions, particularly async decisions in a way that was in line with our values and transparency and empowerment for the community, and this was a good first opportunity to test them out.

Processes

[recap] On the discussion issue, we had a good chat with multiple inputs from both the Steering Committee members and community members sharing feedback, then I wrote up a short "voting comment" which stated it was a voting comment, what the proposal was we were voting on, the deadline for the vote, and how to vote (emoji or with text). Folks responded, and we confirmed the Steering Committee's endorsement. The policy response has been submitted and added to the Turing Way Community on Zenodo - I would call this a success and I think it's a good model for us to follow for future decisions on similar work.

However, it did bring up some remaining questions about both the process and the underlying policy for this work, which I've outlined below.

• How much notice do we need at a minimum for async voting? (for example this time, folks had just over 24 hours to vote, which felt quite short, but quite a few of us were already aware the work was ongoing, so perhaps we didn't need lots of time to make a decision?)
• How should we handle SC time off/leave if a short turnaround time is required? (could adjust quorum, register folks as abstaining automatically if we know they're on leave, chair makes a call after asking for input, or do something else...)
• Do we need to include in the voting info what happens if a vote doesn't pass (for example, in this instance, Richard could still submit and publish to Zenodo, but he would submit on behalf of himself and some individuals rather than "from the Turing Way community")
• What other information do community members need about how voting works, the process or principles for policy submissions specifically, or any other aspect of this specific instance which might be usefully generalisable to future instances? (note that for a lot of it, it's written down somewhere, I just haven't put it in a pull request yet...)

For policy proposals specifically, I think it would be helpful to have some guidelines around best practice for getting endorsement from the steering committee, and what endorsement looks like - I'd favour light touch here because I want to encourage the community to do this type of work and not have it be onerous or a barrier! But having something written down gives everyone a place to point to in the future and feel confident about the way forward.

Who can help?

• anyone interested in governance of The Turing Way community!