Overall I think the direction this takes us is moving in the right direction and it’s the right time to move forward with improving the governance process. This proposal I think largely reflects an effective way for the community to continue improving and building. The one suggestion I’d like to make is to Async consensus gathering the default rather than calls.
The primary reason for this is because calls don’t tend to scale well due to time zones and conflicts of when people can participate leading to more calls and less coordination overall which I believe is what’s already been experienced today. By instead moving to async consensus we then have a more accessible and scalable approach for people to get ideas and it should end up reducing the number of calls most people need to be on. Essentially just trying to apply the “this call could have been an email” meme to our consensus process.
What I think would still be needed to figure out between the short term and long term plan is how we transition from calls being the primary form of consensus gathering to an async format being the primary format and what that async format looks like. Today it’s meant to largely be ETH magicians and a small amount of GitHub for async discussions, but it seems like discord, TG channels, and Twitter are filling the void for whatever we’re missing from the intended two. I’m not sure what’s right on this so I’ll punt on it for now too.
From there I’d imagine we’d reduce down to fewer calls with their focus more on fork timelines, status updates and merging changes that reflect consensus achieved elsewhere to the Meta EIP. We’d be able to scale this approach further so that people all across can opt into the discussions they need to be apart of only.
The other question I’ll throw out too. How do you see the governance process being managed and evolved between the short term and long term? Historically I think this has been something that’s slowed things down because we haven’t had a method to resolve governance issues easily and instead we’re stuck until basically all EIP editors agreed.
All in all, I think this is a good improvement. The details will matter here to some, but they’re small issues that can be resolved along the way. The overall vision points us in a good direction and I’m looking forward to seeing the improvements that come from this long term.