To chime in with Rust experience — this seems to be part of the “essential complexity” here (or at least something which is very hard to solve with tooling). In Rust, discussions are always sprawling, official places to discuss designs are:
- the RFC PR
- the tracking issue
- the ACP, MCP issues some teams are using
- the official Zulip
- the official discourse forum
- the official discord
And there are a host of unofficial channels as well, like reddit, community discord and what not. Controversial things tend to get discussed to death across all of these venues (especially big ones also earn a string of stand-alone blog posts by community members).
I would say historically the Rust project tried to organize “one true venue”, but that didn’t pan out, the current state is more of a product of accidental historical factors, rather than intelligent design (some may recall that Rust move off to discord off the IRC, but then it somehow end up using Zulip. Today, I also feel that the internals discourse isn’t really any more “the place that matters”, but there wasn’t an official deprecation).
The best way the Rust project found to fight this is with summaries — someone has to plough through all the branching discussion, but, if they compile (mostly redundant) findins into a single, concise document, everyone else can refer to it.
There are many places in Rust process which make use of summaries:
- For long discussion thread, someone often writes the summary in the middle example.
- Before voting on a decision, a concise summary is usually provided for what exactly is voted for example
- After the base decision have been made, a tracking issue is created which includes the live summary of what’s actually there example
The people who go and write summaries could be:
- people pushing a particular feature (summarizing is one of the most impactful actions to get things moving)
- members of the decision-making teams (in some sense, it’s their job to ensure that summaries are available for their respective areas)
- just general, “random” community facilitators, who happened to read thousands of messages of discussion of an obscure topic instead of doing something more productive, and who can procrastinate even more by summarizing their learning.