Today’s call was a good example of the limitations of using ACD meetings for governance and process discussions. In addition to this proposal, I shared two small process-change items for discussion and feedback, but time constraints did not allow for meaningful depth.
During the meeting, I raised both Add Optional “Upgrade” Field to Standards Track Core EIPs and Best place to host “Call for Input”.
Ideally, I would have walked through the different variants of the proposed Upgrade field, outlined the trade-offs of each option, and taken questions to converge on a single approach before drafting an EIP. That was not feasible, as client developers understandably prioritized upgrade EIP selection over EIP template improvements.
Some may think, today was not the ideal moment to raise this. In a world of multi-upgrade preparations, it is difficult to identify a “perfect” time. Moreover, this request has been pending for long time, and since governance discussions occur only once a month, editors who joined the December call aligned on introducing an optional Upgrade field.
However, editors cannot unilaterally change the EIP template. Feedback is required from client developers, the EF Protocol Support team, and the broader community, which is why the proposal was brought to the ACD call today.
With less than five minutes available per proposal, there was limited opportunity for explanation, resulting in minimal feedback during the call and only one or two comments afterward insufficient to move forward with a template change.
Even with additional time, only a small subset of the roughly 100 participants would have been able to engage meaningfully, while many EIP editors who are not client developers would still be excluded. ACD-C/E/T calls are focused on specifications, and editors typically do not participate, as they have no decision-making role in spec discussions beyond editorial and process oversight.
The trade-off is clear:
15 minutes × 4 calls per week × ~100 participants = ~6,000 minutes , versus
a single 60-minute monthly ACD-G meeting with ~15 relevant participants = ~900 minutes .
From both an efficiency and governance perspective, ACD-G is the better trade-off.