[MOBY-dev] RFC Voting - message to all core developers

[Mark Wilkinson]

So, this just isn't working at all :-/  

A couple of frustrating things have happened v.v. RFC 1863:  

First:  a vote was called, and there were some post-call suggestions
which resulted in a revision of the document.  The vote was subsequently
called off.

Second: there were some late suggestions from Paul and Martin (Oct
17/18) that were not discussed further by the interested parties (in
particular, the group that put forward the RFC in the first place).  An
indication that the suggested changes are accepted/rejected by the
proponents would be a good idea before a vote is called.

Third: In the absence of changes to the document, the call for a re-vote
was made, but was ignored by all but one of the RFC panel members
(including my own local team, so I am just as guilty... but thanks Frank
for being conscientious!).  Whether it be by bugzilla or by email, it
really doesn't matter to me which method people use - since this isn't a
high-traffic event I can make notes on a piece of paper to tally the
votes - but we need to actually DO it.

I don't mean for this to be an accusatory message in any way.  I only
mean to point out that the RFC process for MOBY isn't working as we are
currently implementing it, so we should perhaps come up with a better
mechanism that accomplishes what we need to accomplish.  There are a LOT
of great suggestions currently sitting in Bugzilla that we will need to
start addressing quickly.

Do we need to set up a more dedicated mailing list or forum for RFC
events so that they don't get lost in the general traffic of the -dev
mailing list?  (which is no longer a "low traffic" list, as it is
described in the mailing list documentation ;-) ).  Would a once-monthly
teleconference solve the problem?

What mechanism would the RFC panel find most intuitive and useful?
Bugzilla is already in place, but if people are finding it too arcane, I
can find a pre-canned or script-up an alternative solution... either way
we need to quickly find something that does work, because I'm sure that
David and his team in Spain are going nuts by now (especially since it
is obvious that their RFC is, in principle, going to pass - we're only
negotiating the details now :-) )

M


-- 
"Ontologists do it with the edges!"

Mark Wilkinson
Asst. Professor
Dept. of Medical Genetics
University of British Columbia
PI in Bioinformatics
iCAPTURE Centre
St. Paul's Hospital
Rm. 166, 1081 Burrard St.
Vancouver, BC, V6Z 1Y6
tel: 604 682 2344 x62129
fax: 604 806 9274