I’m puzzled by the pushback here. And I’m puzzled by the claims. I’ve never seen an organization behave the way you and others are describing. Regardless, let’s ignore “what other organizations do” and focus instead on why the status quo is broken and needs to be fixed here.
The claim is that the HF working group is transparent. The claim is that Discourse is a good place to discuss activities. At least, I think that’s the claim. This very thread demonstrates that the status quo breaks this. Without assigning fault, let’s point out that we had an entire conversation for a week straight here. I was specifically asked by WG and interim board members to take initiative on these points. And only later did we all find out that at the 40-person WG meeting, decisions were reached that superseded anything we discussed here. That’s a broken system.
I don’t understand how a 40-person group can be effective in video calls. I’ve never been to those meetings, so I can’t speak to it. I can say that it creates a layer of opacity that I think is unhealthy. Further obscuring behind a week long delay to write down for the public what was discussed essentially means everyone on the outside needs to wait a week after each of these meetings to have any real conversations, because we don’t know what happened at the WG meeting.
@simonpj I’ll tell you directly what I think should be the MO here:
- There is a general HF working group, I don’t have an objection to that
- However, the primary communication platform is Discourse, nothing else
- Other conversations will happen, including video calls, text chats, etc
- Like I did above with Emily, the correct thing to do is to state “we’re taking this discussion offline, and we’ll post a follow up when we’re done.” Essentially: we’re publicly grabbing a mutex
- I think a 40 person general-purpose WG is a bad idea. I think specific, focused working groups are a great idea. Let’s say we decide that we need to rebrand Haskell with a new color scheme (silly example). The process I’d see is:
- Someone raises the point here on Discourse
- People generally agree it should happen
- Someone takes initiative to own the process
- That person says “we’ll go work on this for 2 weeks, if you’re interested, ping me”
- When that person is done, they present their findings here on Discourse
- If there’s disagreement at any point in this, then the board would step in
Right now, the claim that Discourse is the primary communication mechanism is false. The real communication is still happening at a private meeting. It’s great that we now at least have the promise of meeting minutes, but it’s still relegating the community to second-tier at best.