
Hi committee, I’m back, and I _think_ I have caught up on committee work. If you expected me to do something when back and I have not done it yet, I probably forgot and will appreciate a nudge. Richard writes
While I'm happy to take over some of his responsibilities, I don't have access to the proposal-assigning algorithm. (I can view the current state of who has open proposals, but I don't have easy access to e.g. the recent history to accomplish load-balancing.)
and I have to disappoint you: there isn’t much of an algorithm there. It’s all manual and very subjective. Here is what I do to assign a proposal: I open these three links (all linked from the beginning of the README) to remind myself of who is actually on the committee, and who is already shepherding a proposal: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals#who-is-the-committee https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr+lab... https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr+lab... This way I see who is currently not shepherding. I recently added the profile pictures to the Who-is-the-committee section to make that part easier. Then I just pick someone, keeping in mind what I believe is the person’s interest and strength. If someone has already commented on a proposal, they are more likely to become shepherd. I avoid assigning to Chairs unless I have a good reason to. Intuitively, some members are more, well, efficient, others are particularly thorough; I try to keep that in mind as I assign small, large, deep, superficial proposals. And that’s it. I once wrote some code¹ to run statistics on the proposal project to help me pick shepherds, but it is very slow and I haven't been using it in a long time. It’s not a great way to assign shepherds. Here is a better way: All committee members tend to have an eye on incoming proposals and engage early with those that they care about, and voluntarily say that they _want_ to shepherd a particular proposal, so when it is submitted, I don't have to make any more arbitrary choices :-) Cheers, Joachim ¹ https://github.com/nomeata/ghc-proposals-stats -- Joachim Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de http://www.joachim-breitner.de/