[Engineering] Changes in the RFC decision making process

[Gabriel Wicke]

In the last weeks we have been exploring ways to improve our technical
consensus building and decision making process. I wrote a short RFC
[1] describing some issues, and proposed to adopt ideas from the Rust
community [2] to address them. The discussion on the task and in an
IRC meeting showed broad support for the proposals.

In yesterday's architecture committee meeting, we decided to adopt
much of the Rust RFC decision making process [3] on a trial basis.
Concretely, this means:

- We will nominate a member of the architecture committee as a
shepherd, guiding an active RFC through the process. Among other
things, the shepherd is responsible for informing all relevant
stakeholders of the ongoing discussion on the task. The shepherd might
also lead an IRC discussion on the RFC, which will be summarized on
the task.

- Once the discussion on a task plateaus or stalls, the shepherd (in
coordination with the RFC author(s)) announces and widely publicizes a
"Final Comment Period", which is one week.

- At the end of the "Final Comment Period", the architecture committee
decides based on the points made in the RFC discussion, and justifies
its decision based on the overall project principles and priorities.
If any new facts or aspects are surfaced in this discussion, a new
Final Comment Period needs to be started before making a decision.

For now, we are holding off on the second part of the RFC, the
introduction of working groups. There is agreement that we need to
broaden the involvement and scale the process, but the details of how
are still under discussion.

Gabriel

[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Governance
[2]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1068-rust-governance.md
[3]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1068-rust-governance.md#decision-making