openstax / napkin-notes

:notebook: virtual back-of-a-napkin notes (persistent non-structured discussions)

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An RFC process #85

Open aiwenar opened 6 years ago

aiwenar commented 6 years ago

Those present on the OpenStax/Katalyst Education call know what this is. For the rest, if Overview doesn't make it clear, feel free to ask.

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Overview

Work on any system required a considerable amount of design and discussion, especially when conducted across departments or organisations. If they are not well organised however, it may lead to a considerable waste of effort.

Lacking an organised system of storage for agreed solutions will make them hard to find and easy to miss or forget. Lacking a good medium for discussion will stall progress.

aiwenar commented 6 years ago

I don't think this repository is a good place for such discussion:

description states it's for non-structured discussions while we wan't it to be at least somewhat structured;
it contains a large amount of files (currently 334);
~README recommends to unwatch it, while we'd probably want people to keep watching to know that new proposals are being made.~

philschatz commented 6 years ago

I like the idea of having an RFC process for large ideas, and like using GitHub Pull Requests over GDocs or Wikis.

The napkin-notes repository began because people were using https://gist.github.com to share code snippets and ideas which is why the directory structure was organized by username. However, its use has since morphed into a place for putting both notes and decisions.

The original reason for having "Un-Watch this repo so you don't get spammed" in the README was because frequently only subsets of people need/want to be aware of changes. This way people could opt-in (by clicking the "Subscribe" button on a Pull Request).

I think that same feature could apply to RFC's since one RFC could apply to only a subset of people while another RFC could apply to a different subset.

But maybe there are better ways?

aiwenar commented 6 years ago

I constantly find myself wanting GitHub to have a notify-me-about-all-new-issues-and-pull-requests-but-not-anything-else watch setting. It would appear I'm also forgetting it's still just a wish. Shame.

It might be useful then to create a weekly digest, or a bot (configure staxly?) to notify on Slack about new RFCs.