[Python-Dev] Discussion overload (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sat Jun 18 21:57:49 EDT 2016

On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 6:17 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:

Over on the "security SIG" thread, the point has been made that we seem to be hitting some limits in communication (Steve Dower said written communication, Guido said mailing lists/newsgroups). Based on the burnout we are seeing from these centi-threads we need to try and come up with some solution to this problem, else we are heading towards a bad place [d]ue to communication burn-out.

For me, I don't think we can give up written communication thanks to how worldwide we all are and thus make scheduling some monthly video chat very difficult. What I would like to consider, though, is something like Discourse where we at least have a chance to have tools available to us to manage discussions better than through federated email where everyone has different experiences in terms of delivery rate, ability to filter, splitting discussions, locking down out-of-control discussions, etc. I think harmonizing the experience along with better controls could help make all of this more manageable. Agreed that any form of real-time communication is out.

First, I want to apologize to Kevin -- I only skimmed his message. I only saw that he had carefully qualified himself as a long-time open source contributor and list participant when I re-read his message.

I also want to keep this short, so I'm proof-reading this before posting.

Many projects on which I am currently working use one or more GitHub issue trackers as their main communication mechanism (mypy et al. don't even have a mailing list). I find that this works quite well to stay focused. We have quite a few issues that track important discussions over many days, weeks or months, and there is very little noise or cross-talk. It's easy to stay on topic, it's much easier to refer to other topics, it's easy to mute individual topics, and it's much less likely that a topic degenerates into a different discussion altogether (because it's easy to create a new issue for it). It's also easier to moderate, and you can even edit conversations (with restraint). I also like that it's possible to to do sentence-by-sentence quotation, but the extra effort required (copy/paste) encourages a linear thread of conversation within one issue.

I did a quick check of my inbox and I think over the past week I had about as much mypy-related messages generated by GitHub as there were python-dev messages. And I felt much less bad for ignoring much of the mypy traffic while I was on vacation than I felt for ignoring python-dev, because it's easy to catch up using GitHub's web UI. (And no, I don't want to use gmane. I think it doesn't solve any of the other problems.)

I don't know Discourse, but if it has a similar (or even better) feature set maybe we should give it a try. Or, now that we're going to migrate the CPython repo to GitHub, maybe we could just give GitHub's issue tracker a try? We could create a repo that has just a tracker (or a tracker plus a README.md explaining its purpose -- eventually we could add more resources and even a wiki).

I'm sure that in the venerable python-dev tradition everyone is now jumping to give their opinion about Discourse, the GitHub tracker, their favorite alternative, the needs for free-form discussion, the need to have a GitHub account to participate, Slack, and the upcoming Mailman 3.0. But let's not do that, because it would be too self-referential (and defeat the purpose). I think we seriously need to rethink the way we have conversations here, and that includes the conversation about conversations.

Here's my proposal: let's decide what to do about this roughly the same way we decided what to do with Mercurial. We don't have to take as long, but we'll use a similar process: a small committee run by a dedicated volunteer will compare alternatives and pick a strategy. If you're interested in serving on this committee, send me email off-list. If you want to head the committee, ditto. If you reply-all, you're automatically disqualified. :-)

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