Call for proposals for the next governance meeting

[Austin Shafer]

Hi all,

Not a protocol, but I think it would be good to discuss the possibility
of regular Wayland Governance meetings at a decided frequency. Currently
meetings are scheduled on demand to discuss a particular subject or
protocol, but I believe routine discussions could be very beneficial in
progressing protocol designs.

One issue we currently have is that many protocol proposals turn into
multi year endeavors. Explicit Sync [1] is a recent example of this
which was merged after two years, and surface group transactions [2] are
still in review after four years. While these proposals are full of
excellent discussions, if the time is measured in years I think that
means there's room for improvement regarding how long it takes us to
make forward progress. It can also be unclear who is interested in a
protocol and for what reasons, or who depends on it to ship features in
a particular release.

As more distros switch to Wayland by default, I believe having more
frequent/routine meetings would be a good investment to avoid
indefinitely blocking new desktop features. Less formal conversations
can also provide opportunities to see how implementations are
progressing, ask for reviews, and get an idea of when protocols might be
ready to land.  All of these could be beneficial for handling growing
pains: more Wayland users means more feature requests. My hope is this
could reduce the social burden of proposing a protocol or tracking its
progress.

That being said there are many open questions to answer:
- Is there interest in formally making meetings at a certain time
  interval, would the community find this useful?
- How to decide on a time? Poll before every meeting?
- How frequent should the regular meetings be? Monthly? Biweekly?
- How far in advance would we decide on agenda/topics? Tentative agenda
  sent out a week before with a call for topics?
- Pain-points in the existing protocol approval process: would this help
  them?
- Should we track action items from the previous meeting and follow up
  on their status?
- Should there be "status updates"/pings for long-lived protocol proposals?
- Possible agenda items for regular meetings. I have some initial ideas
  but would appreciate more suggestions if there are any pressing
  topics?

Non-goals which I don't want to accidentally accomplish with this:
- Rush discussions or rush protocols out the door
- Force a schedule onto projects or contributors

As always I'm open to any suggestions. I'm happy to drive the discussion
on this in the next governance meeting, and also shoulder the
organizational burden of doing these if we go forward with it.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/90
[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/26

Thanks!
	Austin

On 4/17/24 8:37 AM, Vlad Zahorodnii wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> The Wayland Governance Meeting is semi-regular meeting to drive 
> discussion on wayland-protocols forward.
> 
> We are looking for the proposals for the next meeting as well as people 
> who can lead/drive the discussion. If there is a protocol that you would 
> like to be on the agenda, please submit your proposals here.
> 
> Regards,
> Vlad
> 
>