Also synchronous meetings are unsuited for any meaningful decision making in free software communities. The mumble sessions, due to their synchronous nature, simply make it hard to impossible for all community members to participate even if they want. My personal preference would be to drop both, the mumble sessions and the developer matrix room. Making it rather complicated to apply for the rapid development we see for 2.0. The obvious disadvantage of this way is that some issues are dragged around for months, because no one came up with a solution that one wanted to implement. One major advantage I see in this way is the ability for everyone to contribute, as the fragmentation of audiences is rather minimal and usually people who wanted to get a glimpse onto a topic were able to. This usually ended up in either solving the issue or concluding that the issue might also not being as important as it appeared. If something rather urgent appeared or there were some ideas, but people refused to respond, I consulted individual community members who appeared to be able to contribute to those issues, and asking them for a second opinion. Therefore a lot of issues, where just hanging around, waiting for some bright mind to come up with a pleasant solution. Given how things are in free software, not always did issues get answers immediately. Often this also already happened in parallel to matrix. If the shout into Matrix ended up unhelpful, usually a GitHub issue (given it pre-dated discourse) was raised. Usually leaving PRs 24 hours open to allow everyone in any timezone to have a chance to react. Followed by that, if things became clear, the implementation took place. The usual chain of events, to avoid the word “process” here, was to throw topics into the Matrix room, sometimes people had opinions on things, sometimes not. I want to give a bit of a history about how it was handled before we started the overly active and quite successful 2.0 development: I welcome opinions on what the best place for “(technical) meta-discussions” is (either GitHub issues or Discourse come to mind). I write “percieved” because community involvement might suddenly jump up if we force ourselves to discuss everything publicly.Īfter reading I came to the conclusion that we (yes, I do include myself in that) really should do better in discussing things in public. This leads to things being discussed in a small circle, even though I personally tried to involve the community (via this chat or issues) before implementing major changes.Ī contributing factor to the “backroom discussions” might be a percieved “shouting into the void” aka the lack of responses when trying to discuss something with the “whole community”. The fact is that most of the contributions in the last months came from a handful of students from germany that meet in Mumble every evening and do stuff™.
I also thought about the general topic of “openness and decision process” for a long time last night and do think we have a problem. This was originally posted by me in the dev chat, so context might be lacking a bit.
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