[ghc-steering-committee] GHC proposals

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

I understand the desire to have a constantly updated “dashboard”. But I
don’t think a spreadsheed will work. At least not if your expectation
is that we, collaboratively, keep it up to date. If we already fall
behind our actual review commitments, surely we’ll fall behind
additional red tape commitments. And then we’ll have a file that we
can’t rely on because we wouldn’t be confident that it actually
reflects reality.

And it’s not that I hates manual solutions. In fact, my semi-regular
“status” emails are fully manual! In a way you did more or less what I
do every time I create these: I did through my email and curate the
current status quo. This is tenable because it’s clear who does it (the
secretary, instead of everybody), and because it’s an email there is no
confusion as whether it is is up to date – is is up to date the moment
I write it, and makes no promises about later states.

So that’s a difference in frequency, form and ownership (at intervals
vs. continous; push email vs. pull URL; collectively vs. secretarial).
Your sheet also contains additional fields (Author, various dates) –
maybe I should include them in the status email.

I don’t want to stop us from trying out different procedures, though,
so if there is a general sentiment that a wiki-like process (everyone
collaboratively edits a common file) is worth exploring, we can do that
of course. But I miss the “yes please and I definitely will keep it up
to date” cries from our crowd :-)

Ultimately, the best would be a tool that uses the Github API to create
a dashboard (Note that  most information on your sheet is already
present in github, especially as all status changes are represented as
label changes), maybe even with automatic nudging on github or email…

The next best thing is someone (but someone, not somemany) doing that
manually; maintaining a dashboard like yours, plus nudging. But who
wants to do manually what can be done (mostly) automated…


Cheers,
Joachim


Am Montag, dem 28.06.2021 um 09:56 +0000 schrieb Simon Peyton Jones via
ghc-steering-committee:
> I’m a bit concerned that we are falling down on our commitment to
> decide about GHC proposals in a timely manner.
> Part of the problem is that at any moment I don’t have a clear
> snapshot in my head of what decisions are pending, and who is driving
> them.  I know that Joachim hates manual solutions, but I have spent a
> few minutes digging through my email to build
>  * this spreadsheet giving the current status
> You all have edit permissions.  It covers only the handful of
> proposals that are in our court.   Can I suggest that we all use it
> to keep ourselves on the ball?   E.g. as a shepherd you can use it to
> record who you are waiting for, as I have done for #302.
> You’ll notice that we are behind on every one of them.  Remember, if
> there edits we want the author to make, we push it back, out of our
> court.  It can re-enter when the author re-submits.
> If our commitments are over-ambitious, let’s review them.
> Tom: you are our official nudger.  Would you like to make you weekly
> nudge into an email to the full committee, with a pointer to the
> spreadsheet and your current understanding of who is responsible for
> driving?
> I hope this is helpful.  If not, let’s think of something else!
> Simon
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-- 
Joachim Breitner
  mail at joachim-breitner.de
  http://www.joachim-breitner.de/