Membership guidelines#

This page holds resources for members of the Jupyter Notebook team. They’re meant to guide team members to be happy, productive members of the team!

What are the team resources?#

There are a few resources that are particularly useful for team members. Here’s a quick list to get you started.

  • The Jupyter Notebook Team Compass is a repository with lots of information about team-related things. It has development tips, information about team meetings, milestones and roadmaps, etc.

  • The Jupyter Notebook Team Compass issues are where we often discuss specific, actionable things related to the team (e.g., discussing whether to change something in the team-compass repo).

General policy about communication channels#

We are trying to organize our discussions in order to help both contributors and maintainers find and choose the right communication channels and have a positive experience.

In this respect, we are using:

  1. GitHub issues for specific discussions related to changing a repository’s content (e.g. feature requests, bug reports).

  2. The Discourse forum for general discussions, support questions, or just as a place where we can inspire each other.

How can I help?#

As a member of the team, you are encouraged to continue helping in the same ways that you already have. Your contributions to documentation, code, etc are always welcome.

Don’t forget that, as a member of the team, you’re representing the community when you interact with people (online and offline). Try to keep a friendly, positive attitude, and be welcoming and helpful in bringing others into the community and answering their questions.

Are there any specific responsibilies?#

We don’t want team membership to be a big burden (many of us have one or more other jobs too!) but there are a few things that you should do as a new team member:

  1. “Watch” the team compass repository so that you’re notified when team conversations are happening.

  2. Stay up-to-date on team meetings. You can find a notes from previous meetings pinned at the top of the team-compass issues page.

  3. Vote. Participate in at least 2/3 of votes happening in the team-compass repo. You should be automatically pinged on Github when a vote is called.

  4. Let us know if you’ll be unavailable or out of town for an extended period of time. It’s no problem if you need to focus on other things for a bit, but it’s helpful for the team to know who will be around. If it’s something you’d rather not mention to the public then send an email to one of the team members letting them know, and they can communicate it to the others.

  5. Foster open and inclusive discussion. As a team member, you are responsible for ensuring that conversation in our communities is positive and inclusive. Open public issues to discuss things with the team. Try to do most communication in public spaces where others can join, or report back to team members if important conversations happened offline. When creating issues, provide enough context so that others can understand and provide their input. Encourage feedback and input from others often, and be patient when merging code - it is almost better to wait a bit for an approval than to self-merge.

When should I merge a pull request?#

As a team member, you’re encouraged to help others contribute to the project by reviewing their code, guiding them towards making a contribution and improving it, and ultimately merging their contribution into the project.

Having merge rights is both a privilege and a responsibility - please be thoughtful when using it! To that extent, here are a few guidelines when deciding to merge things into one of our repositories:

  • Use your best judgment. As a member of the Jupyter Notebook team, we trust your judgment, and we ask you to use your best judgment in deciding when to take an action.

  • Make sure it’s quality code. We know this is somewhat subjective, but ensure that the code is well-organized and thoughtfully-written, that any new features are documented, and that it abides by best-practices in Python, JavaScript, etc.

  • Make sure there are tests. We try not to merge any new features (or bugfixes!) without adding tests for them. It’s easy to consider something minor-enough that it doesn’t warrant a test, but try to avoid doing this! Adding tests usually only takes a moment, and our future selves will thank us for it later.

  • Make sure there’s been enough time for discussion. We’re an open community with an inclusive decision-making process. This means that sometimes we need to slow down to make sure others have a chance to review and provide their thoughts on changes. There’s no hard rule for this, but try to make sure people have a chance to weigh in. Consider pinging people that you think might be interested in a question, and give it a few extra days before merging if you think a topic will be complex enough to warrant discussion.

  • Don’t be afraid to merge! We know this is a bit counter-intuitive given what we just said, but don’t be afraid to merge new code. If you think a change is really complex or potentially controversial, give it some time, but for most changes it is fine to just go ahead and merge. Again, we trust your judgment, and we don’t want these guidelines to become a burden that slows down development.