Before responding I want to stress that I only have best intentions for the project. Not criticising, genuinely concerned…
This stems from my observation that most things that have happened in the project were with you in a de-facto leader role. And that few if any people have jumped in on the basis of the flat hierarchy and became active contributors, even though the objectives are friendly & safe community (inclusiveness), sustainable & scalable, and - I suppose - easy access & onboarding. This while the reception of the project vision is astoundingly good in the dev community, and many people stressed “how important” they felt the project was.
It may be because people don’t understand the process, or that these requirements aren’t as inclusive as they should be, posing barriers to onboarding with people feeling lost, unsupported.
If I look at the examples related to the decision making process…
Ok, this might work. A member explains a perspective / vision / idea to the community and a fruitful discussion may commence. Decisions and requests for consent may result. Though there hasn’t been response to your 3-part article it sits there being informational, and PR’s have spun off, so it was useful.
But Ceph clearly stands separately. If I write something that more directly impacts the project e.g. describe how I would like particular things to work, then the process becomes less clear. Should I seek consent from the whole community? How do I know where things deviate from the plans that active contributors have in their head? Should I research to forum to find mismatches in roadmap planning? If there’s no response does it mean I can go ahead? Am I on my own in doing so, or is it now a ‘carried decision’?
But anyway… how this works could mature and streamline.
So Heptapod says, paraphrasing “Is the goal [of Mercurial integration] too far away… we only have limited resources?”. Should I see this discussion as individuals negotiating commitments? It seems like no collaboration came forth from this, but it would be interesting to describe the process as if there was an agreement. How would that be presented to the community, as it wouid clearly have big impact?
How many community members are there, and how many votes?
I struggle to clearly formulate my arguments, because there’s so many points to address. But I guess it boils down to that there currently is a mental model of how the organization should work, that you an @pilou clearly understand, but imho still has to prove itself in practice wrt the objectives you have with them. It could become a wonderful FOSS model, idk, but streamlining organization and process constitutes a project in itself and needs to be monitored. E.g. just like you asked user feedback on the product you should ask it on the process, for instance by doing a retrospective with Heptapod.
What were their expectations? How did they perceive their role? Why didn’t it come about? Etcetera.