Hi folks, Council had a chat yesterday about how much review XEPs generally get outside those last-minute reviews required by Council at advancement points, and we generally agree that what happens is often insufficient; in an ideal world Council reviews for Draft, for example, shouldn’t turn up issues because people will have reviewed, discussed and fixed up the XEPs before they reach Last Call.
So, we’re going to do three things 1) Ask that people please try to review/discuss XEPs so that they’re adequately covered. It’s especially in author’s interests, if they want their XEPs advanced, to try to get them reviewed widely so they’re not going through painful periods with (the quite busy) Council being the only people reviewing things (at the last minute). The benefit of this is obvious. 2) We’ve asked the Editors to have requests for Last Calls happen via the standards@ list, and for them to include a short justification writeup - who is known to implement it, whether it’s the latest version, interop status, why it’s important, why there aren’t more changes expected to be needed in the future, etc. The benefit of this is (at least) twofold - one it provides context for Council, and two we hope it will spark more discussion and trigger more review. 3) Before Council vote on ProtoXEPs we’re going to ask that a similar summary be sent to standards@ by the authors explaining why the XEP is important, why any choices were made as they were, whether it’s implemented, etc. The benefits here are, we hope, similar to those for (2), above. Hopefully this’ll cause wider review and discussion of XEPs, and improve the quality. If people have further ideas on improving the quality of XEP review, please share them. /K
