[python-committers] Proposal: an explicit, time-limited moratorium on finalizing any governance decisions

[Doug Hellmann]

Excerpts from Antoine Pitrou's message of 2018-07-19 20:07:41 +0200:
> 
> Le 19/07/2018 à 20:00, Carol Willing a écrit :
> > I appreciate and respect the importance of these decisions. The dates
> > that I suggested, and I am not anchored to any of them, were not
> > selected to rush or be hasty. Instead, it was respect for our time
> > together (at least some of us) at the September sprint and to have all
> > proposals on the table by that time.
> 
> I hadn't thought about the September sprint.  I'd say it's up to people
> to discuss those things there if they want or not (I would prefer if we
> could avoid discussions in select groups like that, but I don't think
> there's any reasonable way to prevent it).

The best way to mitigate it is to agree that select groups who happen to
be able to meet in person won't make any final decisions, and that any
discussions they have that start to trend toward agreement will be
summarized to the mailing list so that the folks not able to be present
can benefit from and participate in the discussion.

> > My biggest concern is that dragging this on into the new year will
> > result in more bikeshedding, more uncertainty, and less confidence in
> > the developer community decision making ability.
> 
> That's a fair point.  But there's also an opposite concern that
> discussions may be deterred or cut short by a too tight deadline.  Even
> simple and uncontentious PEPs take time to write, discuss and finalize.

Maybe it would be better to focus on a first date for submitting
proposals and then wait to set the rest of the deadlines until after
we have a bit more of the discussion behind us. That will give us
a sense for how much consensus there is and how much more discussion
might be needed.

Doug