Question re. Governance about powershell-rfc

[SteveL-MSFT]

We've discussed revisiting the process as well as putting more resources on reviewing RFCs and helping to move them along. However, other urgencies tend to come up. Will discuss this with @PowerShell/powershell-committee next week.

[joeyaiello]

We think we've been slowly addressing this over the course of the last few months with the addition of a weekly 1.5 hour meeting for us to make progress on RFCs (from which I'm typing right now). We know it's still an uphill battle, but we'll continue to set "plan to implement" RFCs (where the author plans to do the code work to make it happen) as a higher priority.

[kilasuit]

I 100% agree with @Jaykul in that the actions here seem a little averse to being truly transparent, even if accidental in nature.

Take as an example the committee notes that concern the following PR PowerShell/PowerShell#4311 that inevitably changed the mention of RFC's aren't currently (as far as I am aware) available to be seen publicly, this leads to the prior Black box scenario where the community aren't able to see all the decision points that lead to the point where we are currently, that and the @PowerShell/powershell-committee tag shows as private in PowerShell/PowerShell#6323 - this could be easily just be a simple Github settings issue but even this little thing could be perceived as being less than fully transparent in nature,

One thing that I expected to see with the open sourcing of PowerShell was that the community of experts, which you've dubbed Area Experts would have a much more triage focused role as it was written up, which I suppose I expected that this grouping would have been more closely aligned to the including many of the MVP's as they'd always been the gap between Microsoft and the real world, something that I feel has become a bit jaded over time.

Whilst I can also understand that there's been some of movement in the members of the team over the course of the open source lifetime of PowerShell, including members leaving not just the PowerShell team but also leaving Microsoft, which adds some further internal & external complexity to managing the project. There have also been some "lessons learnt" along the way, including what works and what doesn't, which includes the RFC process and whether the process helps or hinders the actual main goals of the and whilst I could echo pretty much everything that Joel has said above, I don't think that this something that can't be pulled back and gotten control under the details mentioned in the Governance Document.

But in all, sharing Committee notes, Enforcing the Governance Processes, ensuring that it's as open and transparent as possible AND expanding roles to the community would be good points to take to the next committee meeting 😉

[Jaykul]

Please, file an RFC ...

[vexx32]

@SteveL-MSFT @joeyaiello

I'm in agreement with many of @Jaykul's comments here. The RFC process seems to have a few holes that need patching up. The governance processes outlined on the PowerShell repository proper are not being followed as they seem to have been intended.

I am sure there were no ill-intentioned changes, but I'm not sure it's feasible to let it by the wayside. At the very least, the documents detailing the processes need to be updated to reflect the actual policy, since it seems fairly evident that the process may be too cumbersome for constant use and could use some revising.

And, ultimately, it appears many portions of this RFC repo are being left in the dust. There are some documents that have gone through the process as expected in recent weeks, which is great! But for those that do not, for whatever reason (whether it be due to lack of time on the author's part, lack of interest by the community, etc.) should probably be relegated to a Rejected or Abandoned folder as necessary. Leaving them in the Draft stage for months or years on end seems to be a bit of a hindrance for new RFCs, if anything at all.

Perhaps the RFC repo needs a bot to keep track of RFCs and their linked issues (perhaps mandate that RFCs link to their relevant issues as part of that) and be flagged by the bot as Stale similar to how PRs are in the main PowerShell repo and eventually moved to an Abandoned folder or other appropriate location to leave room for new ideas and continued growth and change?

It doesn't seem right for things to sit here for months and years on end with no clear resolution. 🙂

Perhaps a topic the Committee ought to consider and take a vote on?