I've been meaning to reply to this for about a week, sorry for the delay. This is a topic I've been thinking about for a *long* time, so apologies for the long thread :P
I think there's two issues here. One is *how* to have the discussion, and the other is how to *end* the discussion. From the comments so far, it seems we're still somewhat split on point 1, but we're all agreed we need to find a solution to point 2. As such, I'm only going to discuss point 2, as that's where we currently struggle. For ways to end a discussion, I think there are several options. I've stayed away from this area for a while, because it can be fairly explosive, but it's clear we do need a way to conclude a discussion. One choice is to have a group of people responsible for deciding on these things (a "technical council" or whatever title you wish to use). There's no doubt that this works, but I dislike this option but it's exclusive, requires a great deal of overhead (particularly documenting how the group works, and how to become a part of it, and so forth). As a data point, Libreoffice do this, with a similar order-of-magnitude of regular contributors. Another is a simple vote, but then you have to balance the "when" and "how". Preserving the "quieter voices" (that is, people whose expertise is valuable, but who don;t want to wade into a big discussion) in our community is important, and votes are good for this, but close-to-50% votes can be very divisive. PHP use this method, with the extra clause that the author of the RFC gets to call the vote (after a minimum wait of 1 week from opening), and they find it works for them. We could also turn to 3rd party systems to help us with discussions - as an example, I believe the Diaspora development community use Loomio for their decision making, but I have no data on how well it's working for them. I#m not for this option - we already use enough tools - but others may like the idea. At this time, my gut feeling is: a) The group is split on the RFC repo, so let's not call it dead yet b) The RFC repo works well(ish) as a place to discuss design c) It needs process improvements to reflect how it's *actually* being used d) We could add the vote system from PHP for closing discussions e) (tangent) We could also use said vote system for foreman-dev discussions As further info, here's the recording from my discussion at FOSDEM on this topic (where the above comments about Libreoffice and PHP come from, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in there): http://mirror.onet.pl/pub/mirrors/video.fosdem.org/2017/UD2.119/ community_closing_loops.mp4 So, to the point - how would people feel about trialing this? We'd need to decide (a) if we want to test it, (b) how to call for & record votes, and (c) when to end the trial and decide on whether to keep it. If you're against this idea, please do suggest how else we might collectively improve our ways to finish discussions :) Cheers Greg -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "foreman-dev" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
