Proposal: The Decision Making / RFC Process

Greetings from the Neos Sprint in Frankfurt!

Yesterday we formed a small group to (re)discuss the “Decision Making” topic.
We started by going through this very draft and adding some ideas & fine-tuning.
This morning we quickly presented the outcome and the general feedback was quite positive. Also the concept goes quite well with the planned project restructurings.

So I think we’re ready to go ahead and should start writing down the initial guidelines.
There are still a few questions:

  • PRIVATE/ANONYMOUS vs PUBLIC/NAMED votes
  • in general we should try to keep everything transparent and public
  • I’d suggest to start with public votings only. If we come across decisions that require privacy/anonymity (e.g. security feature/personal matters) we can redefine that process
  • LIMITED TO TEAM MEMBERS vs OPEN to everybody
  • still to be defined, probably it will depend on the impact of the decision. With the new team structure in place small and medium decisions can probably be voted upon within the team. large decisions within all teams and/or possibly with public participation.

Some new opinions from the sprint:

  • We have the feeling that we should start off with pretty strict rules at least for medium and large decisions (ask in slack, create discourse post, timeboxed discussion phase, timeboxed voting phase) and to adjust/relax the processes if they don’t work out
  • Roles of the new team structure could be incorporated in the process (just a rough idea):
  • synchronizers* should keep track of new suggestions in order to help newcomers and in order to prevent “repeating history”
  • prioritizers* can pull in closed decisions into their team as projects
  • elders* should escalate “stalled decisions” (e.g. close RFCs after inactivity for x months, …)

* = those are work titles

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