After a lengthy planning and preparation process, Project Jupyter is proud to announce its new governance model, including an Executive Council (EC), Software Steering Council (SSC), Distinguished Contributors, Standing Committees, Working Groups, and Subprojects. We have also elected our first Executive Council, a group of contributors who are now leading Jupyter in 2023.

This governance transition was motivated by lessons we’ve learned as the project grew dramatically in the last decade. Our previous model, used since the project’s early days as IPython and influenced by the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) model of Python itself, had proven insufficient to meet our current needs. Our former Steering Council consisted of members who had made significant contributions to Jupyter and IPython. We decided that it would be better for the project if we separated the roles of “major contributor” and “decision maker.”

First, we developed the Jupyter Distinguished Contributors program to recognize the contributions of our community members. Distinguished Contributors do not have active responsibilities or decision-making authority. Next, we designed a model that would allow a project as broad as Jupyter, both in terms of technical architecture and use cases, to grow in a healthy way. We aimed to create structures to help us make technical decisions effectively, to grow the human and social aspects of the project and community in a sustainable manner, and to manage the diverse, multi-stakeholder nature of Jupyter with fairness to all. Jupyter’s stakeholders range from individual volunteers to some of the largest tech firms in the world, from academics to government and industrial users. Our intention is that with our new governance model, all of our stakeholders can create ideas, tools, spaces and communities around interactive computing.

Jupyter’s new governance model

The project website provides an overview of the new governance model as well as details on its individual components. Please refer to those pages for specific information. In summary, the BDFL+Steering Council structure has been replaced by a small, elected Executive Council (EC) that works together with a Software Steering Council (SSC) made up of representatives from our subprojects, working groups, and standing committees. Every year, we will continue to recognize new Distinguished Contributors. This new governance model has replaced the previous model as of January 2023.

The BDFL, Steering Council, and institutional partners have served us well in the past, and Jupyter is grateful for all of their support. We are optimistic about the work to be done by our new Executive Council, by our Software Steering Council, by our large community of contributors, and by all of our users who constantly provide thoughtful and informed feedback.

Executive Council (EC)

Our first executive council includes Afshin Darian, Brian Granger, Jason Grout, Fernando Pérez, Ana Ruvalcaba, and Steven Silvester.

The EC is ultimately responsible for many aspects of Jupyter’s governance, including legal, financial, and operations matters. The members of the EC actively work to carry out Jupyter’s mission in accordance with its values. The EC delegates some work to the Software Steering Council, Software Subprojects, Standing Committees, and Working Groups. These other bodies report to the EC, and the EC is expected to support, oversee, manage, and ensure the success of operations across Jupyter. For more detail, see the Executive Council document.

The first EC includes the following individuals, serving either full 2-year terms or partial 1-year terms:

• Afshin Darian, QuantStack, 2 year term
• Brian Granger, AWS and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, 2 year term
• Fernando Pérez, UC Berkeley, 2 year term
• Jason Grout, Databricks, 1 year term
• Ana Ruvalcaba, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, 1 year term
• Steven Silvester, MongoDB, 1 year term

Our first three EC members, who will serve a two-year term, are Darian, Brian, and Fernando. These three people elected one new member for the EC; voters elected two others from a slate of nine candidates. These newly elected members are Jason Grout, Ana Ruvalcaba, and Steven Silvester. All three of these new members will serve a shortened one-year term on the council. In the future, we will have elections every year, selecting new members for two-year terms. Members can serve up to two consecutive full terms.

We held an election in November and December 2022 in which all members of the Union of Councils (UoC) could participate, both as candidates and as voters. The UoC includes all members of all Standing Committees, Working Groups, and Subproject Councils. A person who nominated a candidate (either themself or someone else) wrote a statement of their interest, qualifications, and experience. In total, we received nine nominations for this election. We collected the candidates’ statements into a voter’s guide, and also included instructions about how to vote. We used ranked-choice voting with a single transferable vote, as implemented by Apache STeVe. We collected votes from UoC members via Google Forms. Each voter could select one or more candidates, in descending order of preference, without ties. A tabulator then ran the results through a data prep script, then into Apache STeVe’s tabulation script, to determine the winners through a series of rounds. (In our first election, because I was neither an EC member nor a candidate, I volunteered as tabulator.)

In each round, the tabulation script looked for two candidates with more than a quota, a winning threshold, of votes. If it found two, then it was done. If not, then any winner with more votes than the quota had its surplus votes reallocated to lower-priority candidates, and a candidate with too few votes was eliminated, then in the next round, the script repeated the process from the beginning. In total, it took 8 rounds to select 2 winners from our slate of 9 candidates.

Software Steering Council (SSC)

The SSC has jurisdiction over software-related decisions across Project Jupyter, with a primary focus on coordination across projects and decisions that have impact across many Jupyter Subprojects. It is also a mechanism for representatives of each project to share information and expertise. Technical decisions and processes where the SSC isn’t explicitly involved are automatically delegated to the individual projects to manage their day-to-day activities, create new repositories in their orgs, etc., with independence and autonomy. For more detail, see the Software Steering Council document.

The first SSC includes the following individuals who each represent one subproject or working group:

• Jupyter Accessibility: Isabela Presedo-Floyd
• Jupyter Foundations: Paul Ivanov
• Jupyter Kernels: Johan Mabille, QuantStack
• Jupyter Notebook: Eric Charles, Datalayer / Anaconda
• Jupyter Security: Rick Wagner
• Jupyter Server: Zach Sailer, Apple
• Jupyter Standards: Carol Willing, Noteable
• Jupyter Widgets: Itay Dafna, Netflix
• JupyterHub and Binder: Min Ragan-Kelley, Simula Research Lab
• JupyterLab: Frédéric Collonval, QuantStack
• Voilà: Sylvain Corlay, QuantStack

Each of the above individuals was elected by the Council of their respective subproject or working group.

How to get involved

The Jupyter EC holds office hours every Tuesday at 10:00 AM, U.S. Pacific time. You can find information about joining these office hours on the Jupyter Community Calendar. You can also contact the EC at [email protected].

Jason Weill is a Senior Front-End Engineer at Amazon Web Services; a contributor to JupyterLab, Jupyter Governance, and Jupyter Scheduler; and a member of the JupyterLab Council, the Jupyter Security Working Group, and the Jupyter Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Standing Committee. This article does not represent the official position of amazon.com or any of its subsidiaries.