On 8/2/19 1:14 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
My experience is very much the opposite. It's easy to lose a bit of feedback in a tumult of e-mail; threads don't have any formal closure unless you impose an unrealistic amount of structure onto mailing list discussions.
In contrast, using an issues list forces you to make a deliberate decision about the fate of a particular bit of feedback; if the person raising it disagrees with the disposition of the issue, they can complain there, to the mailing list, or to the chairs directly.
In other words - issues have explicit states ("open", "closed"), owners, and tags ("editorial", "design"). In practice that I've seen, this means that issues get more scrutiny, and there is more accountability -- not less.
Keeping track of "issues" can be appropriate when a document is in a
fairly mature state. Before that point, however, if discussion must be
couched in terms of "issues", whoever gets to define the "issues" wins
the battles.
It's a bit like working group scope - if the scope is defined poorly the
whole output of the WG is likely to be useless or worse.
Keith
