Honestly, I'm not familiar with the Perl way of doing things, but I'm open to learn especially because I see the Perl community going through a (much-needed) reform. Thusly, I'm not familiar with the RFCs (Request For Change?) but I do see the merit for something similar.
However, as far as the judge is concerned, I don't think that it could work any other way than having a dialog on each RFC (or otherwise). A general concensus must be reached for each proposal. A wiki or some form thereof should be set up for everyone to have a place to submit RFCs and also as a source to find out the decisions on those RFCs. Indeed, depending on the Wiki used, discussion for the RFC could be held on there, though I like using the list-serv (as discussion is its sole purpose). In summary, we the community will need to both make the proposals and collectively decide (by matter of majority vote or something to that effect). If someone could briefly describe the aspects of an RFC, that would help clear things up in my mind and give us some kind of standard. As an aside, I'm coming from the PHP community which has left a very bad taste in my mouth. The community and the project itself is stale and not open to change (they're cheering about adding Unicode support as their big new feature for version 6, which is great, but pathetic at the same time). However, I'm also partly in the Ruby community, and I feel quite at home there. I'm hoping to get into Perl again. I've not used it since version 4! M.T. P.S. -- I'm working on a proposal (of sorts) for the beginning of the architecture.