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Attendees:
Andrei Alexandrescu
Walter Bright
Iain Buclaw
Ali Çehreli
Max Haughton
Martin Kinkelin
Mathias Lang
Razvan Nitu
Mike Parker
(Átila Neves was on vacation in an area with limited internet access)
The primary item on the agenda for this meeting was a governance proposal from Mathias Lang. Modeled on Python's PEP 13, the proposal was to establish a self-governing Core Team (CT) of unlimited size, and a five-member Steering Committee (SC) elected annually by the CT. The CT would take on all management and decision-making responsibilities, subject to veto by the SC. The proposal set out a basic set of procedures and responsibilities for each team, including the establishment of Working Groups within the core team to focus on specific areas (i.e., compiler development, dub, DIPs, etc.).
We spent the majority of the meeting discussing the pros and cons of such a structure. Among the points discussed, a major pro and a major con stand out: formalizing governance can potentially bring more order and structure to the day-to-day management of the language and the ecosystem (pro); there's a risk of Walter and being pushed out of the decision making process (con).
In the end, we agreed that some sort of formalized committee that brings more order to the ecosystem is worth pursuing, but that decisions regarding development of the language should be left in the hands of Walter and Átila.
Given that membership in the monthly meetings has expanded over time, and the quarterly meetings include industry reps using D in production, we already have a skeleton of the Core Team outlined in Mathias's proposal. Mathias agreed to go back to the drawing board and draft a new proposal that is smaller in scope and better suited to the size of our community. The goal is to take what we already have and formalize a process for organizing work on priority tasks, managing resources, drafting volunteers, etc., (in other words, a team that can manage the ecosystem), while leaving language design decisions to Walter and Átila.
I will assist Mathias in drawing up the proposal and we will present it at a future foundation meeting (I anticipate November).
A topic that came up in course of the discussion was pull requests blocking on feedback from Walter or Átila. As a remedy, Razvan will be sending periodic updates to them with a list of PRs that require their feedback. Walter is also open to once- or twice-month-meetings with contributors to resolve pull-requests through in-person discussion.
We agreed to establish a page on dlang.org that lists the core team members so there's no doubt who is involved in the management process.
Walter would like to establish a new slogan, or tagline, for D. He asked us all to think about this for a future meeting. (Ali has since solicited some good advice from a relative who is a professional marketer that has gotten us on the right track.)
Our next meeting will take place on October 22nd at 13:00 UTC. This will be a quarterly meeting, so the industry reps will be present.
As always, if anyone has anything they'd like me to put on the meeting agenda, please let me know beforehand. I don't know for sure if we'll be able to fit anything onto this month's meeting, though. These meetings can run long if the industry reps have anything big to discuss, and we're going to have a major item on the foundation's agenda that I expect will consume most of post-industry portion of the meeting (-preview=in). But if you have something, I'll see what I can do.
