D Language Foundation Monthly Meeting Summary (September 24, 2021)

[Mike Parker]

Attendees:

Andrei Alexandrescu
Walter Bright
Iain Buclaw
Ali Çehreli
Max Haughton
Martin Kinkelin
Mathias Lang
Razvan Nitu
Mike Parker

(Átila Neves was on vacation in an area with limited internet 
access)

The primary item on the agenda for this meeting was a governance 
proposal from Mathias Lang. Modeled on [Python's PEP 
13](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0013/), the proposal was 
to establish a self-governing Core Team (CT) of unlimited size, 
and a five-member Steering Committee (SC) elected annually by the 
CT. The CT would take on all management and decision-making 
responsibilities, subject to veto by the SC. The proposal set out 
a basic set of procedures and responsibilities for each team, 
including the establishment of Working Groups within the core 
team to focus on specific areas (i.e., compiler development, dub, 
DIPs, etc.).

We spent the majority of the meeting discussing the pros and cons 
of such a structure. Among the points discussed, a major pro and 
a major con stand out: formalizing governance can potentially 
bring more order and structure to the day-to-day management of 
the language and the ecosystem (pro); there's a risk of Walter 
and  being pushed out of the decision making process (con).

In the end, we agreed that some sort of formalized committee that 
brings more order to the ecosystem is worth pursuing, but that 
decisions regarding development of the language should be left in 
the hands of Walter and Átila.

Given that membership in the monthly meetings has expanded over 
time, and the quarterly meetings include industry reps using D in 
production, we already have a skeleton of the Core Team outlined 
in Mathias's proposal. Mathias agreed to go back to the drawing 
board and draft a new proposal that is smaller in scope and 
better suited to the size of our community. The goal is to take 
what we already have and formalize a process for organizing work 
on priority tasks, managing resources, drafting volunteers, etc., 
(in other words, a team that can manage the ecosystem), while 
leaving language design decisions to Walter and Átila.

I will assist Mathias in drawing up the proposal and we will 
present it at a future foundation meeting (I anticipate November).

A topic that came up in course of the discussion was pull 
requests blocking on feedback from Walter or Átila. As a remedy, 
Razvan will be sending periodic updates to them with a list of 
PRs that require their feedback. Walter is also open to once- or 
twice-month-meetings with contributors to resolve pull-requests 
through in-person discussion.

We agreed to establish a page on dlang.org that lists the core 
team members so there's no doubt who is involved in the 
management process.

Walter would like to establish a new slogan, or tagline, for D. 
He asked us all to think about this for a future meeting. (Ali 
has since solicited some good advice from a relative who is a 
professional marketer that has gotten us on the right track.)

Our next meeting will take place on October 22nd at 13:00 UTC. 
This will be a quarterly meeting, so the industry reps will be 
present.

As always, if anyone has anything they'd like me to put on the 
meeting agenda, please let me know beforehand. I don't know for 
sure if we'll be able to fit anything onto this month's meeting, 
though. These meetings can run long if the industry reps have 
anything big to discuss, and we're going to have a major item on 
the foundation's agenda that I expect will consume most of 
post-industry portion of the meeting (`-preview=in`). But if you 
have something, I'll see what I can do.