Change request
Summary
I propose to adopt RFC (request for change) process for all significant committee initiatives.
Motivation
There is a big disconnect between committee and ruby community itself. Community is often notified after the fact about committee work (usually at the meeting at the rails camp). There is little opportunity for non-committee members to contribute.
New committee members are often excited to implement changes to the organisation when they are elected. Unfortunately those initiatives are often left unfinished after their term is finished. And the following committee members have to clean up the mess if they don’t support the started initiative.
Request for change proposals force to research and explain the benefits of the change upfront. Any ruby community member can contribute to the proposal during the planning phase and/or express their opinion before its implemented.
Such feedback will give the rest of the committee a better idea if the work should be started. That will ensure the change is worth the effort and won’t depend on a single person.
RFC process is very well adopted in the tech communities. It gives a simple and formalised process for anybody to contribute.
Details
Important to note, that small actions don’t need RFC, but still would greatly benefit from it. Any initiative that will take more than couple of months or will affect many people in the community or organisation will have to start with RFC document.
The requester (committee member or anybody else) can create new proposal on the forum. In the proposal they will need to explain pros and cons of the idea. Then the committee can vote if they want to act on the proposal, it needs more feedback, it’s good but have to wait or any other reply they decide is appropriate.
After that the RFC post will be marked with the matching tag. That will allow to transfer the knowledge between committee members even if some proposals don’t look appropriate at the time.
Having a list of new proposals will help new committee members to focus on the preferred changes, instead of coming up with the new ones.
Drawbacks
Since the process forces to do a lot of research upfront and it may not be fun to do. That could lower the number of volunteers. While the number of those volunteers will drop, that won’t have the big effect. If the idea is not worth planning, it’s definitely not worth doing.
Another drawback that there is an overhead in the process for small tasks within the committee. In that case the threshold will need to be adjusted to when ideas require RFC.
But I think you would make a more effective pitch, and I would like to have you on hand to address any concerns if other committee members have them.
