Proposal to Amend "Towards making some decisions"

[Martin Atkins]

Benjamin Yu wrote:
> I had a brief email exchange with Johannes about his proposal. He suggested
> that I submit my proposed amendment to the entire list:
> 
> 1. Let draft proposals be submitted for consideration. (Part of original
> email).
> 2. Let individuals in the community provide feedback on the submitted
> proposals, by a given date. (The Amendment)
> 3. Then finally go through the face-to-face meeting,  
> which will result in a decision. (Part of original email).
> 
> I am proposing to add step 2. I think it would provide a pro/cons list for
> consideration (and discussion) during the face-to-face meeting, and would also
> provide a gauge of what the community feels about the draft proposals.
> 
> This would be an opportunity for those not in attendance to be heard, while
> avoiding any problems (overhead) in establishing a bureaucratic voting
> mechanism.
> 
> The time period for feedback on the drafts would be the Monday to the day of
> the meeting (Thursday dec 1, if I am not mistaken).

I think it would also be valuable to, before discussing the solution,
make some kind of requirements list tagged with the stakeholders of each
requirement. That way it's explicit when a trade-off is made who it
affects and to what extent.

There are two kinds of stakeholder, really. Hypothetical stakeholders
are things like "person hosting his own YADIS identity", "site wanting
to use YADIS to discover profile exchange mechanisms" or "identity
system that uses a bunch of incomprehensible characters as an
identifier". Concrete stakeholders are things like LiveJournal, Martin
Atkins and LID: things that are able to argue for themselves.

It'll be a lot easier to focus on solutions if we can point to a list of
requirements and say "this is good for foo, bar and baz but hampers
noonar, wibble and bonk." We're already doing that to a certain extent,
but since there's no recorded list to refer to the same points keep
getting revisited over and over.