Hi, Am Mittwoch, den 17.04.2019, 10:43 -0700 schrieb Iavor Diatchki:
I also think it's better to have all the discussion in one place. However, I think it would be beneficial to preserve the following two features of the current process:
1. Proposals are still submitted to the committee for review (and we get an e-mail about it). This is useful for me, as while I sometimes read through proposals if I have some free time, I certainly don't track all of them all the time. But I do go and read them once Joachim sends the e-mail that we should be discussing them.
Yes, I agree that the overall process would stay the same, and all status messages (submitted, recommendation, result) still go to this list.
2. I think it would be good to try to keep the committee discussion on Github more or less restricted to the committee and the proposal author. I think this would help keep steer discussions towards termination (which is sometimes difficult even when we are restricted to just the committee :-)
Likely not possible from a technical point of view, but without enforcement not possible from a social point of view. I think if we move the discussion to Github, we have to face (and maybe benefit!) from a larger group of participants. (You can lock conversations, but that would also lock out the original author, see https://help.github.com/en/articles/locking-conversations)
Finally, I'd say that if we are going to discuss things on Github, then we should probably make the mailing list private, since it won't really contain any information of interest to the community. And, it would make it possible to have a private discussion, if we need to (of course, we could do that anyway by e-mailing everyone explicitly, but that's a bit of a pain).
I dislike private mailing lists, but I see the merit, e.g. discussing possible rotations of committee members. I wonder how many non-member are actively following this list.
On the topic of delay: to me it feels that a lot of the time when we have a long delay, is when there isn't a clear consensus in the committee about what to do---I am not sure what we can do about it.
In general, you are right; but in this particular case, there was consensus, it just slipped my attention, and then my regular sweep (which would have found it) was late. Cheers, Joachim -- Joachim Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de http://www.joachim-breitner.de/