The purpose of this document is to formalize the governance process used by the pandas project in both ordinary and extraordinary situations, and to clarify how decisions are made and how the various elements of our community interact, including the relationship between open source collaborative development and work that may be funded by for-profit or non-profit entities.
The official version of this document, along with a list of individuals and institutions in the roles defined in the governance section below, is contained in The Project Governance Repository at:
https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas-governance
pandas is a community-owned and community-run project. Major technical changes to the project are managed by the PDEP (pandas enhancement proposal) process, described in PDEP-1 at https://pandas.pydata.org/pdeps/0001-purpose-and-guidelines.html . Because of the large scope of the project, the project is managed by a number of different Teams, who each have responsibilities for different aspects of the project. A Steering Committee, elected on an annual basis, coordinates the activities of the different Teams.
The pandas Project (The Project) is an open source software project sponsored
by the 501(c)3 NumFOCUS Foundation. NumFOCUS provides pandas with fiscal, legal, and
administrative support to help ensure the health and sustainability of the project.
The goal of The Project is to develop open
source software that is the fundamental high-level building block for doing practical,
real world data analysis in Python. Additionally, it has the broader goal of becoming
the most powerful and flexible open source data analysis / manipulation tool available
in any language. The Software developed by
The Project is released under the BSD (or similar) open source license,
developed openly and hosted on public GitHub repositories under the pandas-dev
GitHub organization. Examples of Project Software
include the main pandas code repository, pandas website, and the pandas-stubs library.
The Project is developed by a team of distributed developers, called Contributors. Contributors are individuals who have contributed code, documentation, designs or other work to one or more Project repositories. Anyone can be a Contributor. Contributors can be affiliated with any legal entity or none. Contributors participate in the project by submitting, reviewing and discussing GitHub Pull Requests and Issues and participating in open and public Project discussions on GitHub, mailing lists, and other channels. The foundation of Project participation is openness and transparency.
The Project Community consists of all Contributors and Users of the Project. Contributors work on behalf of and are responsible to the larger Project Community and we strive to keep the barrier between Contributors and Users as low as possible.
The Project is formally affiliated with the 501(c)3 NumFOCUS Foundation (https://numfocus.org), which serves as its fiscal sponsor, may hold project trademarks and other intellectual property, helps manage project donations and acts as a parent legal entity. NumFOCUS is the only legal entity that has a formal relationship with the project (see Institutional Partners section below).
This section describes the governance and leadership model of The Project.
The foundations of Project governance are:
- Openness & Transparency
- Active Contribution
- Institutional Neutrality
To manage the project, there are different Teams that each have responsibility for specific aspects of the project. Collectively, the members of all Teams are referred to as Stewards of the project. Individuals may be members of more than one Team.
The role of the pandas Steering Committee is to coordinate the activities of the different Teams and to ensure that different policies and procedures are carried out in a consistent manner. The Steering Committee has no routine decision-making authority, except as detailed herein, although in exceptional circumstances it may be called upon from time to time to make decisions that are in the best interest of The Project as a whole. The Steering Committee will itself decide when a circumstance is exceptional. The Steering Committee may not override a PDEP. When the Steering Committee meets to discuss an issue, the members of the Steering Committee are responsible for soliciting input from members of the relevant Teams.
The Steering Committee may create a working group to consider changes to the governance model described in this document, including the creation of new Teams that support the goals of The Project. Changes to the governance model will require a voting process and approval equivalent to the process described in PDEP-1, with the exception that all Stewards are eligible to vote.
The Steering Committee may appoint temporary working groups to work on issues, such as governance, that fall outside the scope of responsibilities for the existing Teams.
The ideal composition of the Steering Committee consists of 5 people. The Steering Committee will be chosen via an approval voting process from a slate of nominees, meaning that each person who is eligible to vote may vote for more than one candidate from the slate. All members of each Team, except the Code of Conduct Team, are eligible to vote.
The initial slate for the Steering Committee election will consist of 5 or more candidates who volunteer to be on the slate of candidates for the initial Steering Committee. For the initial election, the members of the previous pandas core team will vote via an approval voting process. The top 5 candidates receiving votes will then become members of the initial Steering Committee.
Subsequent changes to the membership of the Steering Committee will occur towards the end of each calendar year. By October 31 of each year, each member of the Steering Committee will be asked if they would like to continue in that role. If any member decides to step down from the Steering Committee, new volunteers will be solicited from the group of stewards by the Steering Committee. Those new volunteers, along with any current Steering Committee members who wish to remain on the Steering Committee, will then be on a slate for an election that will occur by November 15 of that year. For each year after the initial election, the current Steering Committee members plus any new volunteers on the slate will be elected via approval voting, with the top 5 candidates elected as Steering Committee members for the subsequent year.
The terms of each member of the Steering Committee are from January 1 to December 31 of each calendar year, and Steering Committee members may serve for any number of multiple terms, provided that they are re-elected in each annual election.
Each Team has defined responsibilities for different aspects of the project. As a general rule, an Individual Contributor can be nominated by a member of a Team to become a member of that Team, and the Team must agree to admitting that person to the Team, since every Team member becomes a Steward of the Project. If a member of a Team is inactive for more than one year, the active members of the Team may decide to remove that person from the Team. Decisions about admittance or removal of Team members should be made by the Team as a whole, as long as there are no objections from active Team members.
Each Team will maintain its own private mailing list if the Team deems it to be necessary. There will also be a mailing list consisting of all Stewards of all Teams.
Each Team has specific responsibilities as well as authorities over permissions, as defined below. In addition, specific criteria are used by Team Members to guide decisions on adding new Members to the Team.
The Steering Committee has the authority to change the responsibilities of individual Teams, remove or consolidate Teams.
The description of each Team can be found in https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas-governance/teams.md .
It is expected that all Stewards will be employed at a wide range of companies, universities and non-profit organizations. Because of this, it is possible that Stewards will have conflict of interests. Such conflict of interests include, but are not limited to:
- Financial interests, such as investments, employment or contracting work, outside of The Project that may influence their work on The Project.
- Access to proprietary information of their employer that could potentially leak into their work with the Project.
All Stewards shall disclose to the Steering Committee any conflict of interest they may have. Stewards with a conflict of interest in a particular issue may participate in Team discussions on that issue, but must recuse themselves from voting on the issue, if such a vote is necessary. If a conflict of interest is not disclosed and later uncovered, it will be left to the Steering Committee to decide how to handle the lack of disclosure on a case-by-case basis
To the maximum extent possible, Team discussions and activities will be public and done in collaboration and discussion with the Project Contributors and Community. The Steering Committee will have a private mailing list that will be used sparingly and only when a specific matter requires privacy. When private communications and decisions are needed, the Steering Committee will do its best to summarize those to the Community after eliding personal/private/sensitive information that should not be posted to the public internet.
The Stewards are the primary leaders of the project. No outside institution, individual or legal entity has the ability to own, control, usurp or influence the project other than by participating in the Project as Contributors and Stewards. However, because institutions can be an important funding mechanism for the project, it is important to formally acknowledge institutional participation in the project. These are Institutional Partners. An Institutional Contributor is any individual Project Contributor who contributes to the project as part of their official duties at an Institutional Partner. Likewise, an Institutional Steward is any Steward who contributes to the project as part of their official duties at an Institutional Partner. With these definitions, an Institutional Partner is any recognized legal entity in the United States or elsewhere that employs at least one Institutional Contributor or Institutional Steward. Institutional Partners can be for-profit or non-profit entities. Institutions become eligible to become an Institutional Partner by employing individuals who actively contribute to The Project as part of their official duties. To state this another way, the only way for an Institutional Partner to influence the project is by actively contributing to the open development of the project, on equal terms with any other member of the community of Contributors and Stewards. Merely using Project Software in an institutional context does not allow an entity to become an Institutional Partner. Financial gifts, which are recognized on the pandas web site, do not enable an entity to become an Institutional Partner. Once an institution becomes eligible for Institutional Partnership, the Steering Committee must nominate and approve the Partnership, after soliciting input from the Stewards. If at some point an existing Institutional Partner stops having any contributing employees, then a one year grace period commences. If at the end of this one year period they continue to not have any contributing employees, then their Institutional Partnership will lapse, and resuming it will require going through the normal process for new Partnerships.
An Institutional Partner is free to pursue funding for their work on The Project through any legal means. This could involve a non-profit organization raising money from private foundations and donors or a for-profit company building proprietary products and services that leverage Project Software and Services. Funding acquired by Institutional Partners to work on The Project is called Institutional Funding. However, no funding obtained by an Institutional Partner can override the Steering Committee. If a Partner has funding to do pandas work and the Steering Committee decides to not pursue that work as a project, the Partner is free to pursue it on their own. However in this situation, that part of the Partner’s work will not be under the pandas umbrella and cannot use the Project trademarks in a way that suggests a formal relationship.
Institutional Partner benefits are:
- Acknowledged on the pandas website, in talks and T-shirts.
- Ability to acknowledge their own funding sources on the pandas websites, in talks and T-shirts.
- Ability to influence the project through the participation of their Steward.
A list of current Institutional Partners is maintained at the page https://pandas.pydata.org/about/sponsors.html .
Original Version: February 15, 2016 Complete Revision: ???, 2024
Portions of this document were adapted from the NumPy governance document.
To the extent possible under law, the authors have waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to the pandas project governance and decision-making document, as per the CC-0 public domain dedication / license.