Re: RFC: Policy process considered harmful
On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 01:58:31AM -0600, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Disclaimer: the below is a half-baked long-term proposal for a process
> change. If you're wondering about how to do useful work today, please
> ignore it. But comments welcome.
>
> Hi,
>
> My experience has been that the policy process works pretty well when
> a policy delegate is involved in the discussion. Seconds for good
> proposals are not hard to find, most parties have good faith, and the
> result is that the proposals that get adopted are well reviewed and
> carefully thought out.
>
> On the other hand, when policy delegates are not involved, it seems to
> me that some participants are frightened by the complex process into
> not participating, and others are perhaps not fearful enough,
> resulting in a chaotic discussion.
>
> I would like to propose an alternative policy process. In practice
> for policy delegates, I expect it might be similar to the current one,
> but for contributors I think it would be more intuitive. It would
> work like this:
>
> 1. Person proposing a policy amendment describes the change, with any
> supporting information she can find to help explain it.
>
> 2. Discussion.
>
> 3. When the amendment looks, in the policy delegates' opinion, like
> good policy (they may decide what that means), a patch gets
> applied to the debian-policy repository.
In my opinion as a policy editor, the major roadblock in the policy is
that someone needs to write the patch, and well, I do not see how a different
process would alleviate the need for a patch.
Also some of the proposals are very technical and policy editor might lacks
personnal knowledge about the issue, and so they need external help.
Cheers,
Bill.
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