@UefiPls I agree with the general sentiment you express, as well as with a few particular points such as multiple communication channels and various accessibility issues. I think we’re in an untenable situation in that regard, because it disproportionally privileges people with lots of time on their hands, and tends to burn out even those.
I‘m personally working towards establishing more structured decision making processes, and bootstrapping that essentially means getting “the right people” to play along – which is a very unstructured decision making process. It’s tricky and delicate.
I was involved in some of the things you mentioned in a critical tone, and I‘m aware of a couple of mistakes that happened. In particular, in my opinion the nix-book repo turned out to be a bad implementation of a good idea and we should garbage-collect that without breaking too many links.
What I’ve experienced people being most successful with so far is this: visibly propose small changes and implement them immediately once there is consensus. If there is headwind, the change is too large in scope. If you can’t implement it within an afternoon, the change is too large in volume. Anything that’s not merged (in the broadest sense) doesn’t matter anyway, therefore optimise for finishing things.
That doesn’t answer how to make far-reaching decisions more efficient, of course. I think we can get there with the same kind of small steps. We’ve established multiple new teams in the past two years, and each one of them is building organisational knowledge and culture as they go. We can already see how this is slowly leading to clarifying responsibilities, establishing predictable routines, and increasing visibility of decisions made and work done, and how those approach ever more difficult problems together.
One of the next challenges in that area will be to make all that easier to participate in, by finding a healthier balance of in-person and written asychronous communication, as well as it’s amount and pacing, in order to fight the curse of availability. I‘m convinced this primarily requires more care and discipline by those privileged with availability, and especially those getting paid, myself included.
But primarily, again in my opinion based on what I’ve seen work well or fail, we have to double down on establishing firm ownership and responsibilities, combined with transparent communication and predictable processes. I think it almost doesn‘t matter how decisions are made as long as they can be introspected by those affected and leave enough time to raise concerns.
Do you have concrete ideas how to start fixing the issues you mentioned in small steps?