With a couple FEPs under our belt, it seems like a good time to open a discussion around improvement of the Fediverse Enhancement Proposal process. A discussion which will I hope continue for as long as FEPs are relevant, but for the time being, we shall use as a reference point the first one: FEP-a4ed
A successful outcome of this discussion would be a set of topics that break out the issues and agree on reasonable fixes for each, ultimately culminating in a replacement that brings it all together into a version 2.
As far as suggestions, issues, problems I’d like this thread to be pretty free as a sounding board. To avoid getting too serious I’d like to quote part of the FEP FEP which deserves increased attention.
Proposals may be entertaining and humorous (unlike this proposal).
What would you improve? What have you seen working elsewhere that we could adopt? Feel free to brainstorm below.
Obviously I wouldn’t create this thread without some idea for improvement and one that sticks out to me now that there’s a lull in activity is the built in delay. Step 5 has this requirement to wait:
After at least 60 days the authors may request the proposal to be finalized. This is done by requesting final comments on the proposal.
Is this based on the idea that interested parties might be on sabbatical? Thing is implementing what’s in any FEP is totally voluntary and there’s no exclusivity as to another FEP also addressing the same need so I feel that could be shortened to 45 or even 30 days.
Open issue: How to increase awareness and relevance of FEP’s?
Many (starting) fedi devs don’t even know about SocialHub, let alone are members, let alone find out about the FEP process, let alone find the relevance of FEP’s, let alone be incentivised to actively participate, let alone to notify of their implementation of a final FEP.
Various possible solutions: Encourage PR to FEP repo, document in FEDERATION.md, represent in NodeInfo, compliance testsuite / implementation reports.
Another improvement: Attach or reference tutorial-like content to help implementers. Ask current implementers to provide these docs.
The first one could be its own thread since it really lives in the space between the FEP repo and the rest of the world.
Deprecation and replacement is definitely not addressed in the first FEP and should be with a v2. I don’t think it has to be anything crazy innovative either, just a process that has worked for other standards efforts. The first FEP was meta, and it looks like v2 would be as well!