Becoming a team member#

Team member responsibilities#

Active team members actively carry out the responsibilities listed in the Membership Guide Page.

Active and inactive membership#

There are two types of team members, active and inactive.

Active members:

  • Must be nominated by a current team member.

  • Can be elected as the Software Steering Council representative for Jupyter Notebook.

  • Get a vote in a voting situation.

  • Count towards quorum in a voting situation.

  • Are expected to participate in a majority of the team votes.

  • Can nominate new team members.

  • Should actively participate, either synchronously or asynchronously, in team meetings.

Inactive members:

  • Were previously an active team member.

  • Do not vote.

  • Are not counted towards voting quorum.

  • Can “reactivate” at any time by expressing their change in status publicly.

Team members can freely pass between active and inactive at any time. They should publicly state their status change in a pull request that updates the contributors.yaml file with their status change.

This means an inactive team member can “reactivate” themselves at any time by publicly stating their change in status. This does not require a nomination from another team member.

For example, a team member who is going out on a long leave/vacation (>2 weeks) can temporarily move to the inactive team during their absence and immediately reactivate upon return. This isn’t required, but this can relieve them from having to watch this repository for any formal votes that happen during their absence.

Nominating a new member#

For someone to become a team member, they should already be a consistent, positive, productive member of the community. Newcomers are encouraged to become team members after they’ve shown a sustained interest in engaging with the community. Moreover, team members should be interested in continuing their engagement over a long-ish period of time (at least one year), generally putting in more time and effort than non-team members. This doesn’t have to mean contributing code - it can be assisting others in forums/issues, reviewing pull requests, participating in team meetings, etc.

Any new team members must be nominated and championed by an active team member. This process takes the following steps:

  1. The champion should first discuss internally with team members to ensure that there’s general consensus before officially starting the process.

  2. If there seems to be team consensus, the champion contacts the potential new team member and asks if they are interested. Don’t forget to run them by the Membership guidelines page to make sure they understand what they’re signing up for. If so, then move to the next step.

  3. The champion opens a new issue in the team compass repository. The issue should state your support of the new team member, discuss why you think they are great and why they should join the team.

  4. This issue should stay open for around 7 days to give members of the team a chance to weigh in their thoughts (and support!).

  5. If there are no objections that haven’t been resolved, the new team member is welcomed into the community as an official team member!

Membership Maintenance#

Every six months, one currently active member should open an issue in the team-compass repo asking all currently active team members to reply if they still consider themselves active. If not (or no response is given by a team member), it will be assumed that they have gone inactive. This will help keep the active team up-to-date.

Remember, an inactive member can return at any time by simply changing their status on the team-compass page.