Governance research

[skade]

@xampprocky has drafted a call to action to research into other organisations. We have agreed in the triage that we want to do this, please reread it over the weekend for posting around Monday.

https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Governance-WG-Call-To-Action--Aiw5O5hNzTzOnqpnPlYJizljAg-lJ2YQoUkIQzPYsXZJZMEN

[nikomatsakis]

I think the paper document is looking pretty good! I would like to move forward with this.

I think there are a few questions that are worth figuring out:

• Where do we post the announcement and how do we call attention to it?
• How will we track the things that people are working on? Github issues with a label? Who will coordinate that?
• How should people present their results?
  • e.g., written form, zoom calls?
• Also, do we want to run the results by people in those communities to help ensure they are accurate? It seems like we wouldn't want to inadvertently distribute false or misleading information.

[nikomatsakis]

My initial thoughts on those questions:

Where to post the announcement?

Probably posting on an internals thread suffices. Maybe we should make one internals thread for calling attention to governance things and re-use it? We can then tweet out the announcement if we want.

How track things?

We can have github issues for each project, and maybe use some master tracking issue with a checklist, where people can also propose new projects?

How should people present their results?

It'd be nice to have a standard "template" -- probably based answers to the questions outlined in the dropbox paper -- for comparison.

I thought maybe having the option to do a recorded zoom call where people talk about the structure and field questions would be cool, esp. if we can convince people who know the system first-hand to take part.

For that matter, such a call could be the way we gather the info, and then we distill it into written form. i.e., if people have a friend or knowledgeable person who wants to answer questions about the community, they could do a recorded call as a kind of "primary source" -- but that might make it difficult to get information about where things "go wrong".

Run results by someone in the community?

Most definitely a good idea to ask for feedback, I think.