EDIT MADE ON JUNE 27th, 2024: A typographical error was discovered in the GitHub link for Change 2. The link in this post reflects the actual text that will be incorporated in the bylaws should the amendment be approved.
This year, as part of our annual election process, the Python Software Foundation Board is offering three bylaws changes for our Members to vote on. These changes are all centered on our membership experience: making it simpler to qualify as a Member for Python-related volunteer work, making it easier to vote, and allowing the Board more options to keep our membership safe and enforce the Code of Conduct.
Voting Members will be asked to vote on these items during the July Board of Directors election. If the majority of voting members vote in favor of any of the changes, those changes will be incorporated into the bylaws and go into immediate effect.
We're sharing these changes with you today as an opportunity to understand why these changes are being proposed, and to give you an opportunity to ask questions of the Board before you vote, either by emailing psf-elections@pyfound.org or membership-wg@pyfound.org, or by responding to the thread on the PSF discussions site.
The text of the changes are available from the following links, all of which show visual representations of additions and deletions to our canonical bylaws repository:
- Change 1: Merging Contributing and Managing member classes
- Change 2: Simplifying the voter affirmation process by treating past voting activity as intent to continue voting
- Change 3: Allow for removal of Fellows by a Board vote in response to Code of Conduct violations, removing the need for a vote of the membership
The Board has carefully considered these changes and strongly encourages all Members to vote in favor of them. The rest of this post explains the changes, and why we're putting them to our Voting Members.
Change 1: Merging Contributing and Managing member classes
Since 2017, when we adopted our current membership model, we've had four classes of membership: Supporting (recognition for being a monetary donor), Managing (recognition for volunteer work in the PSF or in community events), Contributing (recognition for volunteer work on open source software), and Fellow (recognition of long-term service to the mission of the PSF).
For almost as long as our membership options have existed, there's been confusion about the distinction between Managing and Contributing members. Both require 5 hours a month of volunteer service, but the distinction between community work and work on software is increasingly out of step with how our community thinks about contributing.
In the future, we want community members to qualify for PSF membership by participating and giving back to the community, either through donating, through volunteer work, or in recognition of long service, without distinguishing between code contributions and non-code contributions.
With this proposed bylaws change, we would merge the Managing and Contributing membership classes. All Managing Members would become Contributing Members, and we would no longer have a Managing Member class. Further, this change would explicitly allow for works of authorship (including documentation, books, or blogs) beyond software to count as volunteer work, provided those works are openly licensed.
We think this would significantly simplify the membership categories, reduce confusion, and make it easier for volunteers who both run events and write code to decide which membership class best applies to them.
Change 2: Simplifying the voter affirmation process by treating past voting activity as intent to continue voting
Our bylaws (section 4.2) require every Member to affirm their intention to vote in an election before they can be issued a ballot. This is intended to ensure that our election reaches a quorum (i.e. one third of ballots issued are actually used to vote), and is therefore valid by our bylaws. Due to technical limitations, we only started requiring this affirmation in practice last year. Since then, we've received feedback that the affirmation process has unintentionally excluded some people who had intended to vote.
It is the Board's intention that we make it as easy as possible to vote in our elections, however, we must balance legal obligations that require us to maintain a quorum in our elections.
This bylaws change would allow us to treat any member who voted in the immediately previous year's election as having affirmed their intention to vote. The Board believes that voting in a PSF election is a good indicator that a member is likely to vote again, and including them in the quorum calculation is unlikely to put our quorum at risk.
While there may be technical limitations to us implementing this change, the change is necessary to allow the Foundation to alter the affirmation procedure at all. It is the Board's intention that this change would be implemented for the 2025 election should the Bylaws change be accepted by the membership during the 2024 election.
Change 3: Allow for removal of Fellows by a Board vote in response to Code of Conduct violations, removing the need for a vote of the membership
Currently PSF Fellows are awarded membership for life, as a reward for exceptional service to the mission of the Foundation. There are deliberately very few ways to remove a Fellow from the membership.
If a Fellow were found to have violated the Foundation's Code of Conduct in a way that warranted termination of their membership, currently the only way to remove them would be to put their removal to a vote of all Voting Members (per section 4.15 of our Bylaws). We believe that requiring a vote of the membership to remove a Code of Conduct violator from our community would subject members of the community --- including people directly impacted by that violator's behavior --- to undue distress.
On the other hand, we believe there is significant legal risk that could arise from Code of Conduct violators known to the PSF using their status as a PSF Fellow to enhance their reputation. In cases where the Foundation needs to act in order to continue being able to serve the Python community effectively, we currently have no choice but to name a known Code of Conduct violator as part of a vote put to the membership.
In practice, this requirement limits our ability to effectively enforce our Code of Conduct. This is a disservice to our community.
This proposed change gives the Board, by a majority vote, the ability to terminate the membership of a Fellow as a consequence of breaching any written policy of the Foundation, specifically including our Code of Conduct. This change would allow the Board to act in cases where there is a clear need for a problematic community member to no longer be affiliated with the Foundation, without further perpetuating the trauma caused by that community member's actions.
