Call for proposals for the next governance meeting

[Jonas Ådahl]

On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 11:09:09AM -0400, Austin Shafer 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?

Personally I wouldn't mind making them reoccurring at an interval, but I
do see it being somewhat difficult to achieve.

So far each meeting has had a topic and someone who has been wanting to
lead the meeting. How do you imagine this would work; would we have
someone assigned to handle this, or a rotating position, or ad-hoc
depending on the topic?

> - How to decide on a time? Poll before every meeting?

I see the point of why we'd want to poll, because different topics might
bring different people, with different timezones, but I also see a
problem with polling every time; it's a reoccurring administrative task
that, and there is a risk that people will get tired of answering the
same poll if it's asked of them too often.

Still, in advance whether there will be a quorum helps planning one's
personal schedule, and a time poll could achieve this to some degree.

> - How frequent should the regular meetings be? Monthly? Biweekly?

Perhaps monthly, with any extra following the existing ad-hoc model, is
a good start.

> - 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?

This sounds like agenda topics one would add.

> - Should there be "status updates"/pings for long-lived protocol proposals?

This is somewhat what the last meeting was about, a revival of the
group transaction protocol proposal.

> - 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.

Having meetings ad-hoc has the benefit of not adding a consistently
reoccurring burden on peoples schedule, and if the interest for this is
not big enough, an alternative could perhaps be to make it easier some
how to schedule ad-hoc meetings.

Ideas for that could be a formal place to gather agenda topics and
interest in participation, and someone responsible for organizing
scheduling a meeting when there is enough agenda for a topic. It'll put
an organizational burden on one or more person, but I imagine so is the
case for meetings at an interval, but will require less commitment up
front from the community at large.


Jonas


> 
> [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
> > 
> >