Call for proposals for the next governance meeting

[Austin Shafer]

On 5/7/24 4:04 AM, Jonas Ådahl wrote:
> 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?

I'm happy to assign myself to handling this since it is my proposal. We
could also rotate it or have the agenda item/topic owner lead discussion
about their particular item.

> 
>> - 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.

I think this is a pretty good alternative idea, and as I said before I'm
happy to manage the organization. It would also provide a good ramp up to
a regular interval if we find that we are consistently having many topics
submitted. As I said before I'm happy to handle this, or can split it
if others would like to help.

Is there an existing place to collect agenda topics like this? Perhaps
a gitlab issue or a mailing list thread like this one?

The only major downside I see here is it might be easy for people to
never submit topic proposals and we still end up going long stretches
without meetings.  Especially since this is a new initiative and not
everyone in the community is used to pushing blocked discussions into a
meeting. I don't think this is an insurmountable downside, just a
tradeoff compared to the predictability of a regular interval.

Thanks,
	Austin

> 
> 
> 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
>>>
>>>