On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 6:17 PM, Brett Cannon <br...@python.org> wrote:
> Over on the "security SIG" thread, the point has been made that we seem to > be hitting some limits in communication (Steve Dower said written > communication, Guido said mailing lists/newsgroups). Based on the burnout > we are seeing from these centi-threads we need to try and come up with some > solution to this problem, else we are heading towards a bad place [d]ue to > communication burn-out. > > For me, I don't think we can give up written communication thanks to how > worldwide we all are and thus make scheduling some monthly video chat very > difficult. What I would like to consider, though, is something like > Discourse where we at least have a chance to have tools available to us to > manage discussions better than through federated email where everyone has > different experiences in terms of delivery rate, ability to filter, > splitting discussions, locking down out-of-control discussions, etc. I > think harmonizing the experience along with better controls could help make > all of this more manageable. > Agreed that any form of real-time communication is out. First, I want to apologize to Kevin -- I only skimmed his message. I only saw that he had carefully qualified himself as a long-time open source contributor and list participant when I re-read his message. I also want to keep this short, so I'm proof-reading this before posting. Many projects on which I am currently working use one or more GitHub issue trackers as their main communication mechanism (mypy et al. don't even have a mailing list). I find that this works quite well to stay focused. We have quite a few issues that track important discussions over many days, weeks or months, and there is very little noise or cross-talk. It's easy to stay on topic, it's much easier to refer to other topics, it's easy to mute individual topics, and it's much less likely that a topic degenerates into a different discussion altogether (because it's easy to create a new issue for it). It's also easier to moderate, and you can even edit conversations (with restraint). I also like that it's possible to to do sentence-by-sentence quotation, but the extra effort required (copy/paste) encourages a linear thread of conversation within one issue. I did a quick check of my inbox and I think over the past week I had about as much mypy-related messages generated by GitHub as there were python-dev messages. And I felt much less bad for ignoring much of the mypy traffic while I was on vacation than I felt for ignoring python-dev, because it's easy to catch up using GitHub's web UI. (And no, I don't want to use gmane. I think it doesn't solve any of the other problems.) I don't know Discourse, but if it has a similar (or even better) feature set maybe we should give it a try. Or, now that we're going to migrate the CPython repo to GitHub, maybe we could just give GitHub's issue tracker a try? We could create a repo that has just a tracker (or a tracker plus a README.md explaining its purpose -- eventually we could add more resources and even a wiki). I'm sure that in the venerable python-dev tradition everyone is now jumping to give their opinion about Discourse, the GitHub tracker, their favorite alternative, the needs for free-form discussion, the need to have a GitHub account to participate, Slack, and the upcoming Mailman 3.0. But let's not do that, because it would be too self-referential (and defeat the purpose). I think we seriously need to rethink the way we have conversations here, and that includes the conversation about conversations. Here's my proposal: let's decide what to do about this roughly the same way we decided what to do with Mercurial. We don't have to take as long, but we'll use a similar process: a small committee run by a dedicated volunteer will compare alternatives and pick a strategy. If you're interested in serving on this committee, send me email off-list. If you want to head the committee, ditto. If you reply-all, you're automatically disqualified. :-) -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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