[swift-evolution] RFC: structuring forums for best use for swift-evolution

[Ted Kremenek]

A while back a decision was reached to move from using mailing lists for swift-evolution to using a forum, specifically Discourse.  At the time that decision was made, efforts had been already well committed for supporting the development of Swift 4 — including efforts supporting important infrastructure efforts such as the source compatibility suite.  I apologize for not providing more transparency in why moving to a forum was being delayed.  Some things took longer than expected.

To be clear, the plan is to still move to Discourse, and with Swift 4 winding down there is now bandwidth to focus on making the transition from mailing lists to a forum.  As part of that transition, I’d like to get some feedback from the community.

There has been some good conversations on this mailing list on how swift-evolution can possibly evolve to better serve the needs of the community.  I’m not talking about whether or not we use a mailing list or a forum — that decision has been made.  Specifically, I’m talking about how a forum could best be structured to organize discussions and allow everyone to optimally participate.  In the move to Discourse, we have the opportunity here to possibly do things a bit differently than we have been so far.

For example, here are some of the questions I’m thinking about how we should be use a forum:

-  We currently have swift-evolution and swift-evolution-announce.  Should we use a specific “category” in the forum for "proposals that are in active review" — and possibly remove the need to have something like swift-evolution-announce?  

- Should we have other topical areas to organize discussions?  If so, at what granularity?

We can certainly figure out a lot of this over time, but I’d like some feedback from the community now on things they’d like to see in how we organize the swift-evolution forum based on experiences we’ve had with swift-evolution since it was created.

Please chime in on this thread if you have feedback, and focus on keeping this constructive.

Thanks,
Ted
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