(Resend because I stupidly sent it to the wrong address.  Joachim’s summary really post-dates this email.)

Friends

Here are a collection of suggestions that we might discuss at our meeting today, about managing expectations in the GHC proposals process.   Factors at work:

• Proposal authors are sometimes quite invested in their work, and expect prompt feedback.   
• Yet committee members are volunteers with day-jobs, and reviewing proposals is a kind of blank cheque on their time, and they are doing the community a great service by being willing to do that reviewing. 
• Finally, to an author the benefits of acceptance are sharply-focused and immediate; but the costs are blurry and deferred.   (I’m thinking of costs like: consistency of design, complexity of the language, implementation burden over time..)

Balancing these is hard.  I’ve seen discussion that boils down to a mis-match of expectations.  Here are some concrete suggestions for things that might contribute to making expectations clearer and more explicit.    All of the numbers (four years, two weeks) are just straw-men... the first thing is to decide if we want any of these thing s in principle.

• Make service on the GHC Steering Committee a fixed 4-yr term, with staggered dates so two people retire each year.   Renomination is allowed; but the expectation is that fresh blood is preferred unless there is a clear reason to the contrary.  As I’ve said in earlier email, I think this is just basic good practice for any committee.   Current membership is here.

I’d quite like not to have the reviewing load, but I think that Simon and I should probably be exceptions to this rule

• Write down the constituencies we’d like to see represented on the steering committee; invite members to self-designate which constituencies they feel well equipped to represent; and then add that as a column to the table you have helpfully made.  This will help to show gaps when we are seeking nominations.
• For shepherding, make it clear what the expectations are: no shepherded thread should be dormant for more than two weeks without the shepherd making a proposal for the next step.  And even if actively discussed, the shepherd should guide the committee to a conclusion (accept, push back to author) within two months.

Big proposals may need longer, so the shepherd should be free to (explicitly) propose a different timescale.

• For committee membership, write down expectations about their participation.  Something like
• Participate actively in at least some proposals in the discuss-and-refine phase.
• Review every proposal that is submitted to the committee, within three weeks, and offer a view – even if that view is “I have read the proposal completely but I do not have enough expertise in this area to express a well-informed opinion”
• Act as the shepherd for a small number of proposals (see expectations of shepherds).

Thanks

Simon