No single person is authoritative over the RFC process
Closed this issue · 3 comments
Cool. The RFC process was established since Feb 11, 2017. Eelco had been the authority in RFC process for 7 years.
From what I've seen in the steering committee as a relatively new member, there's really no authority over the process. The lead is rotated for each meeting, and there's also no extra authority when one is lead.
My wording here was a little unclear. I didn't mean to imply that Eelco have held authority over all RFCs single-handedly; what I meant to say is that he had enjoyed a position of elevated authority (compared to someone who isn't part of the RFC Steering Committee) for years.
I rewrote this part to better reflect my thoughts. I've also added extremely important details on how him being in the RFC Steering Committee is problematic. See this commit for contents: 8be3766
Does this address the issue?
Pretty much. I like the additional mention of RFC 49, though I don't quite agree with
This clearly poses a conflict of interests: as a member of RFC Steering Committee, he is supposed to maintain unbiased perspective on the discussion at hand, but he is also an author of RFC and the major player in driving this discussion.
The steering committee mainly just decides over the shepherds of an RFC, that's where they could introduce bias. But that also only matters if you even have enough shepherds to even make a choice, in most cases it's barely enough to even reach the minimum number of 3. I haven't checked that particular RFC for this, but I don't think there was any bias regarding the steering committee there. Also it wouldn't matter anyways, because Eelco closed the RFC himself, the shepherds ultimately didn't make a decision on its acceptance.
This makes sense. From the fairly quick glance at the RFC 49, there doesn't seem to be any issue with Eelco being part of the RFC Steering Committee and choosing shepherds. I was concerned about RFC Steering Committee meetings and the related notes being unfaithful, but it doesn't seem like there were any notes to begin with (and I'm not sure if there were meetings either).
My wording seems to make it a much bigger problem than it was in practice. I'll rewrite this part to mention that there is conflict of interests in being part of multiple teams at once, but I won't assert that strongly that this created problems.