Proposal: Committee Charters

[tkphd]

The Carpentries' Lesson Program Policy requires both a Lesson Program Governance Committee (roughly equivalent to our Steering Committee) and a Curriculum Advisory Committee.

The Carpentries' Committee Policy requires that each Committee have a formal Charter, a member of The Carpentries' Core Team as a liaison, and some of the following Roles: Chair, Co-Chair, Secretary, and Member.

I propose that we draft Charters for each of these Committees, and plan our upcoming annual elections around filling five seats each. Note that the Curriculum Committee should draw from our extensive network of forks, if at all possible.

[reid-a]

Just ran across the Carpentries Planning for Lesson Program Governance Committees (from Nov. 2022), which has a nice picture of the proposed structure and a summary of the roles, consistent with the Lesson Program Governance Policy description.

It has the roles of the two committees in sort of slide form, viz:

Lesson Program Governance Committee

• Oversees strategy for the lesson program as a whole
• Advocates for and represents the lesson program
• Maintains lesson program documentation

Curriculum Advisory Committee

• Maintains an overview of the whole curriculum
• Uses domain expertise to guide curriculum development
• Recommends large, wide-ranging updates to the lesson, lessons, or curriculum

This is probably a good skeleton for the charters.

[tkphd]

N.B.: You can review the proposed Steering Committee charter here (governance.md).

[bkmgit]

• Lesson Program Governance Committee functions can be done by the Steering Committee
• Curriculum Advisory Committee members should have specific lessons to review. This could be done once per year with an online discussion meeting.

[tkphd]

Why do we need committees, and what are they for?

N.B.: we're spit-balling here, nothing is written in stone.

Governance

The Governance Committee is the project. It's responsible for money, resources, and represents The Project to The Carpentries execs. Expected to be relatively deep in the weeds, and may lose focus on priorities.

Key role is to secure and allocate resources?

Curriculum

The Curriculum Committee is the audience, and advocates for those people to the Governance Committee. Role is to set the Governors back on track: suggesting Workshop structure, recommending new lessons, suggesting sunsetting older lessons.

Key role is to tell the Governance Committee when it's missed the mark?

[reid-a]

From the Sept. 21 coordination meeting, a potentially useful resource is that Software Carpentry recently completed their committee charters as part of the migration to the new Carpentries administrative structure. Data and Library Carpentry are a bit farther behind. Maybe crib from them?

Edit to add: That info is here for their governance committee.