Locked RFCs: why and for how long?

Development RFCs
1

After the events of last week, two RFCs have been locked and restricted to “collaborators”.

I have a few points to note about this.

First off, who is/isn’t a collaborator? If I understand GitHub’s docs about this, it’s people with write access to a repo/org.

As someone who has participated in this community for a few years now, but with no commit bit, I find it unfair to be unable to participate. I also don’t think that technical skills equate to social/ethical/empathy skills, so the tools seems very blunt and to hit the wrong target.

Therefore, I would like to ask the current moderators to clarify what their strategy is regarding the locked RFCs:

  • Do they plan on unlocking them?
  • Can we have some transparency as to why the locking was necessary?
  • Assuming the banning of an individual user is justified and well directed, shouldn’t that be enough to then let the conversation proceed? Were we really at a point where there was no conversation possible, among the broader community? If that’s so, that wasn’t my impression

And lastly, I wold like to note the irony of a Request for Comments being closed to comments from the wider community :sweat:

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2

Thanks for the post @asymmetric, I’ve unlocked both posts. Locking topics is a useful technique to let its participants “cool down” for a while. Since that was the goal, the plan was to make it a short-term lock for a few days, but it turned out you can only do timed locks on the whole repository. (edited to add) and clearly an entire week slipped away without me realizing it.

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