[ghc-steering-committee] committee deliberation discussions

[Richard Eisenberg]

Hi committee,

A few months ago, we decided to move final proposal deliberations to GitHub, knowing that this might not work. I'd like to claim: it's not working. Here is why:

* Though I've configured my mail reader to flag messages that invite the committee to deliberate (and this works), later messages in the thread are not thus flagged (and I don't know how I would do so), and so I have to remember the proposals under deliberation manually. This is error-prone.

* The requests to the community to be quiet during deliberation are not working. Some participants miss that message (it can be quite far up the thread!) and then participate. Others doubtless have something to say, but refrain... and then possibly get annoyed at those who don't heed the request.

* Though I haven't collected data, my guess is that there has been less involvement from the committee in these discussions than the ones we had previously.

I thus propose we move deliberations back to this list. However, some good has come from all this, so I wish to further propose:

* Shepherds still post to the GitHub thread before making a "reject" recommendation. Then the shepherd and the author can work out their differences.

* After emailing their recommendation, shepherds post a link to the email archive of the recommendation. This makes the deliberation more transparently a public phenomenon, while still focusing our (committee members') inboxes and our attention. The shepherd may also cross-post thoughts to the GitHub trail seeking more public or author feedback, if that is warranted. Alternatively, we can set up the mailing list so that non-member posts are moderated instead of auto-rejected. The owner of the list (who is that, anyway?) could then approve posts from proposal authors. This is an annoying manual step, but I don't think it will be burdensome in practice.

What do we think?

I'm happy to post a diff to the process descriptor if there is support.

Richard