Call for proposals for the next governance meeting

[Austin Shafer]

On 4/23/24 5:41 PM, Sebastian Wick wrote:
> Personally I would say we could give it a go, but I don't believe that
> this will significantly change how long some protocols take to get
> merged. The group transaction is taking so long because the subsurface
> sync and desync modes together with content update queues are hard to
> get right and the protocol makes everything much worse. The color
> management protocol took so long because it evolved with our
> understanding of color and colorimetry which changed significantly
> over the years. Some protocols are just stuck because stakeholders
> can't agree and most of the time the problem is just time and
> priorities.

I definitely understand that some problems are hard and require thorough effort
to iterate through. Like I outlined earlier it's also a non-goal to rush
protocols out the door: if things need time then we should spend time and get it
right. Although some of the stuck situations come from a legitimate need for
more time to properly validate a solution, I think there's a lot of situations
where it's easy to go off thinking and accidentally never return to the
discussion table in a timely manner. Having habitual meetings gives us some
protections against accidentally letting months go by without making progress.

I also agree that it's worth a try, and we can see if the community finds it
useful and go from there. I think the odds are good these can be productive and
it seems like a valuable investment as Wayland becomes more popular.

Thanks,
	Austin

> 
> On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 5:09 PM Austin Shafer <ashafer at nvidia.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>
>