two points

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Thursday, 9 February 2017 at 23:44:31 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> I appreciate how frustrating it must be to have people saying, 
>> 'Hey, do this! Do that!' without necessarily volunteering their
>> own efforts in support, but organizational improvements so very
>> often fail unless they are eagerly pursued at a leadership
>> level.

Before I respond, just wanted to say: I hope the above didn't 
come over as a personal attack, it wasn't meant as one.  I was 
speaking in general about my experience of what can best 
influence change.

> There are 29 people with commit privileges on Phobos:
>
>   https://github.com/orgs/dlang/teams/team-phobos
>
> What do you suggest? What are you willing to step up and do?

I'm painfully aware that I have limited ability to commit time 
and energy right now.  I think that's one reason have been 
pushing this discussion: because my time is limited, when I _do_ 
find time to craft some code and send it to Phobos or elsewhere, 
it's quite precious to me, and I try to take a lot of care over 
it.  It's not very nice to feel that this time is wasted because 
no one is paying attention to the results, and it's not very nice 
to feel that this is a situation that is just accepted.

So, that said, what would I suggest?  Well, 29 people with commit 
privileges is less than 4 currently-open PRs per person.  Let's 
be conservative and suppose 10 of them are regularly active.

What I would suggest is it takes one or two people with authority 
(important caveat, more on this in a moment) to periodically 
nudge those 10+ people about any PRs that (i) do not have an 
assigned reviewer with commit rights or (ii) do have an assigned 
reviewer but haven't had any activity in more than, say, 2 weeks. 
  This doesn't need to be orders (impossible in a volunteer 
project) -- just encouraging requests for help and 
awareness-raising to make sure that no PR falls behind.

Then in turn, the 10+ people with commit rights need to be 
actively encouraging appropriate people to review the PRs they 
are responsible for, with the sense that it strongly matters that 
no PR author feels they're being abandoned (a feeling which needs 
to be encouraged by the top people: if the people with commit 
rights aren't nudging the reviewers on a particular PR, they need 
to be nudged themselves).

The authority bit matters because the one or two people at the 
top need to be able to field the questions that the 10+ with 
commit rights can't decide for themselves -- in a way that helps 
them understand the principles behind those decisions so that 
they can apply them themselves, confident that they're not going 
to be knocked back if the apply the same principles in future.

Basically, the role of the senior authority figure here is to 
support the people with commit rights in learning how to make 
decisions which won't need to be countermanded.  No one person 
scales, but 10 people who understand 95% of that one person's 
thought _can_ -- and they can pass on that understanding to 
others.

Of course, I understand that I might be suggesting things that 
have been tried and have not worked out.  But you asked for my 
suggestions, so ... that's what seems important to me.