[ghc-steering-committee] Results of committee meeting at ICFP

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi Committee,

some of us (2×Simon, Iavor, Richard, Eric, me) met over lunch at ICFP
and discussed tweaks to the process, and came up with the following
changes. Of course we want to give the other members a chance to
comment and speak if up if something is a bad idea, so we won’t be
implementing the immediately (but preferably soon).

 * Proposals that are in “Pending committee decision” phase will
   have a [committee] tag appended to the title, so that we can filter
   emails by that status.

 * We drop the restrictions for non-authors to comment in that phase. 
   It doesn't work and sometimes we do want the insights of the others.

 * We will update wording in the README to tell authors that it is ok
   and not impolite to nudge the shepherd if the process seems stalled.

 * We will update wording in the README to tell authors that turning
   a proposal back with “needs review” is not a bad thing.

 * If we have later proposals that are not stand-alone proposals, but
   rather changes to existing ones, and those get accepted, then
   the updated proposal should link back to the changing PR, just
   like it links to the original PR
   (e.g “This proposal was discussed at … and amended by ….”).

 * We will stop renumbering proposals sequentially, but instead simply
   use the PR number, so that we no longer have this two-number 
   confusion. (We should have done that from the start :-()

 * We will actually re-number the already accepted proposals, but leave
   the old files there to point to the new location, so that existig
   links stay valid.
   (Either as symlinks or simply as very short files, I will see how
   GitHub presents either of these options).

 * We considered making it a requirement that authors find a number of
   “endorsers” for their proposal, but were not sure if that is useful.
   But we would like to experiment with that concept, so we would add a
   section to the template that will contain a list of endorsers, and
   endorsers could indicate to the author that they endorse the
   proposal on the GitHub comment thread, and the authors then adds
   them.

   The expectation for an endorser is that “they support the proposal
   as if they were an authors, and they would happily have submitted 
   it themselves, had they had the idea and time.”

   Endorsers have no hard role in the process, but hopefully ensure
   that proposals are seen and read and checked by more people before
   submission, and we get a bit more signal by seeing how many people
   and who also wants this.

 * Although most people were at least mildly in favor, we kicked the 
   question of fixed terms down the road. But I will send out the 
   brief “how do you feel about your work in the committee”
   questionaire that we had a few months ago around once in a while,
   with the explicit purpose to nudge members to maybe get more
   involved again, or plan to rotate out.


What do you think?

Cheers,
Joachim





-- 
Joachim Breitner
  mail at joachim-breitner.de
  http://www.joachim-breitner.de/