D Language Foundation Weekly Planning Session Update

[Mike Parker]

Last week, in my post titled ['A New Era for the D 
Community'](https://forum.dlang.org/thread/avvmlvjmvdniwwxemcqu@forum.dlang.org), I announced that Ucora had taken us through IVY, their organizational development program, at no charge. In that thread and elsewhere, the announcement received some positive feedback. I also saw some questions raised and skeptical speculations made. I'll address the two biggest questions here, and then I'll provide a short summary of our first concrete steps toward the new era.

### What is IVY?
I said in the post that IVY is "a simple but innovative approach 
to workflow". Despite its simplicity, not one of us who 
participated in the program grokked how it could help us in one 
or two sessions. It took multiple sessions for the light bulbs to 
go off. It's one of those things that's obvious in hindsight, but 
might take a bit to get there. Given that, I expect that any 
attempt I make to describe it in a forum post would not be 
fruitful.

I can say unequivocally that IVY is not some sort of "consulting 
propaganda". We went through 15 sessions. Some of us were 
skeptical in the beginning, but that disappeared as we went 
along. We didn't spend 20+ hours of our lives mindlessly 
listening to nonsense. What we have learned is going to help us 
do things we were clueless about before. From our perspective, 
having seen the program firsthand, there's no doubt in our minds 
about that.

As we go along, you'll have more information available from your 
perspective to make more informed judgments about what it is and 
how we're applying it. It's not like IVY is Top Secret 
information. Our guest keynote speaker at DConf '23 is our IVY 
coach, Saeed Sabeti. His talk is going to be about IVY in the 
context of the D community. He and I are also discussing an idea 
to go beyond the talk with a special event at DConf that will 
bring even more clarity to those who participate.

Sometime soon, I'm going to start reaching out to regular 
contributors and easing them into the IVY concept. Then I'll 
reach out to semi-regular contributors and then start looking for 
new contributors, with a goal of transforming "semi-regular" and 
"new" to "regular". Non-contributors don't need to know what IVY 
is, but even so, I'll be happy to help anyone interested to 
better understand it even if they have no intention of actively 
contributing to our core projects. You can accept it or reject 
it, choose to apply it or not. But we expect that those who do 
accept and apply it will see benefits in their own workflow.

Let's leave it at this definition for now: At its heart, IVY is 
about communication. It's a means of aligning the goals of 
organizations and stakeholders by understanding the motivations 
of each.

### What sort of changes are coming?
The short answer: I don't know. That's what we're going to figure 
out in our new weekly planning sessions.

The longer answer: I have an idea about some of the changes, but 
when I wrote that post there was nothing concrete. At the end of 
this post, I can give you something concrete.

So given that, how can I be sure this is a new era for the D 
community? How can I claim that "this is going to be the most 
significant change in the D community in the 20 years I've been a 
part of it"?

Employing IVY is going to *completely change the way we operate*. 
That alone is such a huge change that it can't help but have 
major consequences. It's going to impact the way we make 
decisions, the way we interact with contributors, the way the 
community understands what's going on, the way we deal with the 
ecosystem at large, and impact us in other ways I can't predict.

What we're not going to do is start ordering people around and 
telling them what to do. This isn't about that kind of 
management. This is about bringing order to chaos, helping 
contributors identify potential contributions that best align 
with their motivations, helping D programmers at large understand 
where we're going, and generally bring more direction to the D 
project.

Whether you're a CTO at a company using D or a hobbyist knocking 
out code in your spare time, you need to have some confidence 
that the community, the ecosystem, and the language have a 
future, and especially be able to determine if that future is 
aligned with your goals. Contributors need to know that their 
contributions have value, and it helps if they can see beforehand 
that any potential contributions that align with our interests 
also align with theirs.

That's the sort of thing that this is all about. We aim to remedy 
the project management shortcomings we've been suffering from for 
a few years now. We're confident IVY will help us get there.

### The first planning update
And that brings me to the update. We had our first planning 
meeting at 16:00 UTC on Friday, May 12, 2023. I'm not going to 
summarize this or any future planning meetings in the same way I 
summarize the monthlies and the quarterlies. I'm only going to 
provide updates about what was decided. I also won't be posting 
updates after every planning meeting, only for those meetings 
that resulted in something to update (e.g., a decision reached, 
or a plan of action made).

The following people attended this time:
* Walter Bright
* Martin Kinkelin
* Dennis Korpel
* Átila Neves
* Michael Parker

Ali, Iain, Robert, Razvan, and Mathias were unable to attend, but 
they're up to speed.

Our goal for this meeting was to establish the first steps we 
should take under our new workflow. We agreed on the following:

* The [vision document we published last 
year](https://github.com/dlang/vision-document) is "on hold". 
We're going to replace this with something else. I'll have more 
about that in a future update.
* We need to establish a set of high-level goals and the tasks 
and subtasks to achieve them. We have a solid set of data to work 
with thanks to the feedback I received from my Gripes and Wishes 
campaign. Over the next few days, each of us is going to think 
about our high-level goals, specific projects or tasks, language 
features, etc. that we'd like to see. The others will email me 
their lists and I'll incorporate them into the existing dataset. 
I'll publish it for all to see on Thursday. On Friday, we'll 
start the task of sorting through everything, establishing our 
goals, and prioritizing tasks. I anticipate this will take 
multiple meetings to achieve.
* We need a place to publish our goals and task lists so that 
potential contributors can decide how and if they'd like to 
contribute, and so that interested parties can see our progress. 
We agreed that our [GitHub projects 
page](https://github.com/orgs/dlang/projects) is the place for 
it. We all have homework to go through the documentation so we 
can dive in headfirst when we're ready to get going with it.
* Our future planning meetings will take place on Fridays at 
15:00 UTC.

## What you can do
Follow my planning updates. Keep an eye on the goals and task 
lists once they're published. Tell us when you think we're 
getting it right. Tell us when you think we're getting it wrong. 
Tell us your ideas. The planning sessions are not a replacement 
for the monthly and quarterly meetings. If you're using D in 
production, commercially or free, I'm happy to bring you into the 
quarterly meetings. And anyone is welcome to join us for one or 
more monthly meetings to contribute ideas and feedback.

We're serious about this, folks, but we need help to make it 
happen. If you'd like to pitch in, then just keep an eye out for 
the right opportunity. Some time, somewhere, a task is bound to 
pop up that aligns with your goals and motivations. Let me know 
when you see it.