Stacks Improvement Proposal Process

[GinaAbrams]

Hey Stacks fam! I wanted to start a discussion around the governance process and specifically a high barrier to entry for folks that don't use GitHub day in and day out. A core part of any community's governance is access to information and clear paths for engaging. Recent experiences in exploring the SIP posting process have highlighted the nuances of posting SIPs that make it difficult for the broader community to participate, and I wanted to start this discussion to propose that the current process should be reconsidered.

See the instructions listed here:

Submitting a Pull Request Pull requests are welcomed and encouraged!
Please follow this general procedure:
Fork/clone the repository
Create a new branch related to the PR: git checkout -b my-branch-name
Make changes and push to your fork
Submit a pull request for review

While this may be straightforward to some, for the rest of us it creates extra friction right off the bat where research is needed before even considering posting a SIP. When Ethereum Improvement Proposals and Helium Improvement Proposals are in the discussion and discovery phase, discussions happen in real time (added to meeting agendas) and not through PRs on GitHub.

My proposal to the community is that formal communications on SIPs should be able to happen on the Stacks Forum and in meetings (maybe the Weekly Stacks Blockchain Engineering Calls) ahead of SIPs being formally posted as PRs to GitHub. This would make it a lot easier to engage with and digest content without the barrier to entry.

What do others think?

[jcnelson]

That all sounds good to me for draft SIPs, since they're still being punched up.

But I do believe that once a SIP is accepted -- i.e. it's ready for review and has a SIP number assigned -- it should be available on Github. This is because unlike a forum, Github will preserve both contextualized comments and the edit history -- both of which are valuable for CAB members to submit feedback and audit a SIP's evolution in response to it.

[GinaAbrams]

Thanks for the input @jcnelson! Think we're aligned 🙂

[joberding]

While this may be straightforward to some, for the rest of us it creates extra friction right off the bat where research is needed before even considering posting a SIP. When Ethereum Improvement Proposals and Helium Improvement Proposals are in the discussion and discovery phase, discussions happen in real time (added to meeting agendas) and not through PRs on GitHub.

Gina, Thanks for bringing this up.

Your post is in line with a recent discussion in the Governance working group and an issue raised by @Hero-Gamer. I agree that there should be general meetings on draft SIPs (as well as an option for async discussion IMO) but adding it to the developers/miners/builders meetings may not be the answer for meaningful community SIP education. My suggestion is a monthly SIP meeting with an opportunity for Q&A and post-meeting async discussion in the Stacks Discord Web3gov channel.

[Hero-Gamer]

Hi Gina,

Love you are also thinking about this topic! I agree barrier to participate or even be aware of what's going on for an average non dev end user of Stacks is just too high if things were just happening on Github.

• Like Juliet said, I would advocate for having the end users be involved meaningfully in the SIP consensus process, which I have voiced in this conversation: SIP: Modify Coinbase Reward per Block & Halving Schedule #68 (comment)

• I created a channel for discussing SIP & BIP in a community-led discord which I host with a few others. In there, I have also posted quite a few resources of how Bitcoin come to consensus, where we could take some learnings from: https://discord.com/channels/931089448383434814/971389812206600222/971427980087820358
  (if anyone wants to enter this discord pls just DM me I'll send the invite)

• In Stacks Discord Werner (@314159265359879) and I attempted to kick off some conversation about it in #clarity-lab channel: https://discord.com/channels/621759717756370964/971037457661444156/976222317694832700
  Maybe we can think about if we make a dedicated SIP channel in Stacks server

• Stacks Forum feels like something only OG uses, 90% of the new Stacks users from the past year are not on there. So we would miss out a majority of voice.

• I like the idea of some kind of SIP meeting.

• I think what would be great, is for those who care about the SIP process to all get our heads together, arrange a voice call. What do you guys think?

• One opportunity that might be a very appropriate get together time, is maybe around Thursday 1pm EST Gov Lab Working Group call (there is one today, and the next one is in two weeks, it's a bi-weekly thing), it's much easier and productive that can lead to actionable stuff if we just chat around it bounce ideas on a call, vs typing on Github) See #Web3gov channel in Stacks server: https://discord.com/channels/621759717756370964/675389252816732166/974372800884252712

I've been super into the process of BIP lately due to the BIP-119, and feeling very inspired that we can take a lot of learning from Bitcoin's decentralization ethos and activation process over to SIP given the context of Stacks is still at early stage.

Thanks

[jcnelson]

One opportunity that might be a very appropriate get together time, is maybe around Thursday 1pm EST Gov Lab Working Group call

I think we'd want to get their permission first, since they have a pretty full agenda as-is. This one filled the hour, for example. I kinda see that meeting as meant to capture issues related to the governance CAB more than the general SIP process.

What if we had a SIPs call right after it? As in, every other Thursday at 2pm-3pm EST? I can host it.

[diwakergupta]

@GinaAbrams this feedback from @kantai in a recent forum thread is relevant to your proposal:

This forum thread is hard to follow, and it’s hard to figure what is specifically being proposed. In responding to various comments, there seem to be changes suggested, and it ends up not being clear exactly what the final design would be. Some of that may just be because a forum thread isn’t a great tool for these kinds of discussions. I prefer github discussion posts for this reason: you can create threads within the thread.

Thoughts?