Our process for consensus is unclear and sometimes slow

[mfisher87]

We have some questions that have been open for a while, for example, what do we do about Poetry? #374

Personally, I don't know when we've reached consensus and can safely get going on the work. We have a lot of opinions to take in to account. What should our process be? What is the official channel that people should look to if they want to stay in the loop on decisions and make their voice heard? How do we unambiguously represent our vote? How long do we wait? How many / what ratio of people need to agree before we declare "consensus"?

How do we record our decisions? (Decision records! Decision records! 🎉 )

Personal opinion: We should avoid a "BDFL" role, but a designated tiebreaker to keep us from getting stuck on trivial things might be good (with the caveat that not all ties necessarily need to be broken in a timely manner, depending on the problem being solved).

[mfisher87]

@jrbourbeau I'd love to hear your opinion on this :)

[itcarroll]

According to the opensource.guide, two alternatives to "BDFL" are "Meritocracy" and "Liberal contribution". We seem much closer to a Liberal contribution approach, which runs into this issue ... how to bring consensus seeking discussion to a close. I agree that formalizing a mechanism to close discussion could help maintainers and contributors become more effective at fixing bugs (there are a lot!) and developing enhancements. Could anyone essentially move to close discussion by 1) adding a "pending consensus" label, 2) clearly stating a plan, and 3) waiting until some quorum of positive emojis are added? Anyone with triage permission would have "veto" power (removing the label) to resume discussion.

[mfisher87]

That sounds like a reasonable approach to me. In light of #760 I'm thinking something like needs/consensus. One problem with emoji reactions on GitHub is that after a certain number, you can't see who has reacted. E.g. mfisher, itcarrol, ..., and 5 others reacted with thumbs up emoji. Instead, folks could post a very specific emoji (:zebra:) in an actual post to unambiguously indicate consent? That way, we can see the user's badge indicating whether they're a member of the project or not.

Once we have made such a decision, we could consider the GitHub issue to be a decision record? Perhaps we add a new label to indicate a decision record is contained within? Or, the person seeking consensus is responsible for adding a decision record to the docs?

[mfisher87]

ASF on consensus / decision-making, featuring "lazy consensus" https://community.apache.org/committers/decisionMaking.html

A decision-making policy which assumes general consent if no responses are posted within a defined period. For example, "I'm going to commit this by lazy consensus if no-one objects within the next three days."

Sounds like a useful tool to have in our belt, and have a name for it :)