I'm going to avoid trying to get too much into point-by-point back-and-forth argument here, and try to present the larger picture.
The Technical Board has multiple active responsibilities under DEP 10. Let's look at some of them: 1. Canvas for feature proposals once per feature release of Django. This also comes with a responsibility to ensure the proposals are archived in a useful way -- we used to have wiki pages in Trac for this, but DEP 10 doesn't require any specific mechanism. This is supposed to happen within one week after feature freeze of each feature release. 2. Set the release schedule for each feature release of Django. This is supposed to happen within one week after the prior feature release coming out. 3. Maintain the teams of Mergers and Releasers, including by nominating and confirming new members of those teams when the Technical Board considers it necessary (or when the current roster falls below the DEP 10 quorum). 4. Vote, as requested, on DEPs. 5. Vote, as requested, on any technical decision that fails to resolve through normal public discussion. (1) has not been happening. It's possible that (2) has been happening and just hasn't been that formally published, but I suspect it's been the Fellows who've been doing that one. For 3-5, things have gone... not so great. It took multiple attempts to get the Technical Board to vote on the first Merger nomination (Claude), and if we're being pedantic it still wasn't quite done correctly because his appointment as a Merger should have been temporary and auto-expired after the first Technical Board election unless the new Board voted to confirm him permanently. The first time the Technical Board voted on a DEP was the proposed DEP 484 for type hints. The Technical Board's discussion and voting on it apparently took place entirely in private and the result was communicated publicly via Carlton copy/pasting the reply he got from them. And we lucked out that the Board didn't accept the DEP, because it was at a time when an election was pending and thus they had no power to accept a DEP (similar to the Merger nomination -- once an election triggers, the Board cannot accept DEPs and can only make temporary appointments of Mergers/Releasers). On (5) the only explicit request I can find in this mailing list's archive is one from Carlton to make a decision on ticket 31747. Although several Technical Board members posted opinions in response, I'm not finding any statements of their votes on the matter. If grant a half point for the Merger nomination (though the Board really ought to hold a public vote to properly permanently confirm Claude), and maybe another half point for the fact that release schedules have been getting set (though, I suspect, not explicitly by the Board), that gets us to 1 out of a possible 5. This is not a great track record. Before we propose a different setup, I think we need to figure out what went wrong here. It already seems like some members of the Technical Board may not have really been familiar with the responsibilities, or may not have understood that some of the required duties were in fact required. And it seems that several members of the Technical Board found themselves in positions where they didn't have the time/capacity to carry out the responsibilities, but also took no action to communicate this outside the Technical Board. Are these things that would be solved by yet another governance rewrite? Or are they things that could just as easily happen again? I suspect the latter. So I think proposals for new governance should be on hold for now until these things are sorted out. Also, on a personal note, I'd be a bit annoyed if DEP 10 were basically tossed aside without being properly tried in practice. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/CAL13Cg-Y90u7wH8v9ZoWRT_5ZEnr%3Dhpe9ga6t28tn%2BrPH_Ussg%40mail.gmail.com.
