On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 11:09:09AM -0400, Austin Shafer wrote: > Hi all, > > Not a protocol, but I think it would be good to discuss the possibility > of regular Wayland Governance meetings at a decided frequency. Currently > meetings are scheduled on demand to discuss a particular subject or > protocol, but I believe routine discussions could be very beneficial in > progressing protocol designs. > > One issue we currently have is that many protocol proposals turn into > multi year endeavors. Explicit Sync [1] is a recent example of this > which was merged after two years, and surface group transactions [2] are > still in review after four years. While these proposals are full of > excellent discussions, if the time is measured in years I think that > means there's room for improvement regarding how long it takes us to > make forward progress. It can also be unclear who is interested in a > protocol and for what reasons, or who depends on it to ship features in > a particular release. > > As more distros switch to Wayland by default, I believe having more > frequent/routine meetings would be a good investment to avoid > indefinitely blocking new desktop features. Less formal conversations > can also provide opportunities to see how implementations are > progressing, ask for reviews, and get an idea of when protocols might be > ready to land. All of these could be beneficial for handling growing > pains: more Wayland users means more feature requests. My hope is this > could reduce the social burden of proposing a protocol or tracking its > progress. > > That being said there are many open questions to answer: > - Is there interest in formally making meetings at a certain time > interval, would the community find this useful?
Personally I wouldn't mind making them reoccurring at an interval, but I do see it being somewhat difficult to achieve. So far each meeting has had a topic and someone who has been wanting to lead the meeting. How do you imagine this would work; would we have someone assigned to handle this, or a rotating position, or ad-hoc depending on the topic? > - How to decide on a time? Poll before every meeting? I see the point of why we'd want to poll, because different topics might bring different people, with different timezones, but I also see a problem with polling every time; it's a reoccurring administrative task that, and there is a risk that people will get tired of answering the same poll if it's asked of them too often. Still, in advance whether there will be a quorum helps planning one's personal schedule, and a time poll could achieve this to some degree. > - How frequent should the regular meetings be? Monthly? Biweekly? Perhaps monthly, with any extra following the existing ad-hoc model, is a good start. > - How far in advance would we decide on agenda/topics? Tentative agenda > sent out a week before with a call for topics? > - Pain-points in the existing protocol approval process: would this help > them? > - Should we track action items from the previous meeting and follow up > on their status? This sounds like agenda topics one would add. > - Should there be "status updates"/pings for long-lived protocol proposals? This is somewhat what the last meeting was about, a revival of the group transaction protocol proposal. > - Possible agenda items for regular meetings. I have some initial ideas > but would appreciate more suggestions if there are any pressing > topics? > > Non-goals which I don't want to accidentally accomplish with this: > - Rush discussions or rush protocols out the door > - Force a schedule onto projects or contributors > > As always I'm open to any suggestions. I'm happy to drive the discussion > on this in the next governance meeting, and also shoulder the > organizational burden of doing these if we go forward with it. Having meetings ad-hoc has the benefit of not adding a consistently reoccurring burden on peoples schedule, and if the interest for this is not big enough, an alternative could perhaps be to make it easier some how to schedule ad-hoc meetings. Ideas for that could be a formal place to gather agenda topics and interest in participation, and someone responsible for organizing scheduling a meeting when there is enough agenda for a topic. It'll put an organizational burden on one or more person, but I imagine so is the case for meetings at an interval, but will require less commitment up front from the community at large. Jonas > > [1] > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/90 > [2] > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/26 > > Thanks! > Austin > > On 4/17/24 8:37 AM, Vlad Zahorodnii wrote: > > Hello, > > > > The Wayland Governance Meeting is semi-regular meeting to drive > > discussion on wayland-protocols forward. > > > > We are looking for the proposals for the next meeting as well as people > > who can lead/drive the discussion. If there is a protocol that you would > > like to be on the agenda, please submit your proposals here. > > > > Regards, > > Vlad > > > >