From: Thomas Zander <thomas@thomaszander.se>
To: <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 09:50:48 +0200
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Message-ID: <201410160950.48809.thomas@thomaszander.se>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP process
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On Wednesday 15. October 2014 11.36.58 Wladimir wrote:
> > We're also having problems with people failing to comment on things,
> > not even "I looked at this and have no opinion", which is really
> > obstructing things.
> 
> Well - the only way to avoid that is to set a reasonable deadline,
> after which there is a default decision. You'd hope this would
> motivate people to get involved in time.

I have been part of both the OSI (NEN) and the OASIS standards committees for 
a while, working on standards as a technical adviser.

There I learned a lot about how to manage this process, maybe some ideas from 
such committees can be useful.

The idea that one person owns a BIP makes total sense, (s)he is the only one 
that should be putting forward the BIP when its mature enough for making it 
final. Note that this can be already after its been implemented once or twice.

So you have a phase where you have random people propose changes, which should 
all go in the public mailinglist, and they can be accepted by the owner 
without discussion.
If anyone that sees that change has an objection to the change, (s)he speaks 
up and you follow group consensus. This means (and this is actually in an ISO 
standard ;) that consensus is reached when nobody is left objecting to the 
change.

At some point the BIP is mature enough to vote on, at the discretion of the 
owner, and the owner puts it forward and requests a vote. If the above process 
was handled cleanly there is a very small chance of it being down-voted so an 
actual vote may not be needed (its hard to decide who gets a vote..).
You obviously need a deadline for this and afterwards you mark the proposal 
final. Or you close it as "needs more work".
-- 
Thomas Zander