Form new sub-team for administering a plugins index

[travishathaway]

In order to help us manage a curated list of plugins, we will need to form a sub-team for this purpose as specified in our code of conduct. This sub-team will be responsible for approving which plugins get promoted to a special index which will be promoted on platforms such as the future conda.org website.

What needs to be done?

• Find at least one steering council member to be a part of this team
• Find at least one non-steering council member to join
• Create a pull request against this repository outlining exactly who is on the team and what it's purpose is. Exactly how to do this is yet to be determined. Stay tuned! 😅

[jezdez]

I'm happy to sponsor and join this team as steering council member but would welcome other members of @conda-incubator/steering to join, too.

[kkraus14]

I'm happy to join this team as well (not sure if I'm steering or not currently...)

[jaimergp]

The number of plugins is growing so I wonder if we should start doing something about it. At the very least we should recommend setting a Github repository topic like conda-plugin. WDYT?

[jezdez]

I concur, do you want to write a charter for the subteam?

[jezdez]

I'd suggest to grandfather https://github.com/conda/conda-plugin-template into this new subteam.

[jezdez]

@travishathaway @beeankha Would you be interested in participating?

[travishathaway]

Yes

[travishathaway]

@jezdez,

Regarding the actual roles of this sub team, I think it would make sense for us to manage the list of plugins that appear in the index. Adding a new plugin to this index would require a vote that has a super majority (just like CEPs).

Is this kind of thing appropriate to manage at the team level? Or is this a power that should be reserved for the steering council?

We ultimately need a decision making process for how to add items to the plugins index.

[jezdez]

@travishathaway Good question, the CEPs have their own section in the governance policy voting rules, so have a legal foundation basically to require the supermajority.

I, personally, think that since a plugin index would probably not be limited to projects per conda governance policy (read: ~"official conda projects") but would also include projects that are hosted elsewhere, I consider this subteam's effort mostly editorial in nature (akin to mods for other online hosted databases).

There should be a charter that describes how to join the team and what the expectations are (ground rules for collaboration and editorial decisions etc), including team voting rules. Maybe the closest in terms of governance pain (low barrier enough that it encourages participation, but high enough that it prevents malicious behavior) is maybe the rules for adding oneself to a community project team: https://github.com/conda/governance?tab=readme-ov-file#community-project-team-voting

[travishathaway]

@jezdez,

I think that would be a good voting policy to adopt for this project team.

[beeankha]

@travishathaway @beeankha Would you be interested in participating?

Yes, I'm interested!

I'd suggest to grandfather https://github.com/conda/conda-plugin-template into this new subteam.

Related to this comment I wanted to point out that we currently have this plugin repo in the conda-incubator org; perhaps the plugins listed here could potentially be the starting-off point for which plugins get voted on for inclusion in the official plugin index.

[travishathaway]

To help move the formation of this team forward, I have written the following document which consists of both a technical implementation and a maintainers discussion:

• https://hackmd.io/h20oZT_GQjSeIwXIPU0KSg

I invite everyone to review and leave comments.

[travishathaway]

Based on a recent discussion with @jezdez, I believe the best way forward here is to simply utilize the existing conda plugins team. This team is currently located in the conda incubator and is a dynamically chartered team. This means that it currently operates independently of the steering council (more information about that here: https://github.com/conda/governance/blob/main/README.md#sub-teams).

@kkraus14, if you are still interested to help with plugin projects, you are more than welcome to join this team. We currently have the following repository available to use to collaborate things such as the plugins index:

• https://github.com/conda-incubator/plugins

In the future, when/if the plugins index becomes a "production" ready project, we will promote the above repository to the official conda organization if it holds the index as described in my recent proposal.

With all that being said, I believe it is safe to close this issue and move further discussions about the plugins index to the repository linked to above.