C# Language Design Meeting for January 9th, 2023

Agenda

• Working group re-evaluation

Quote of the Day

• "Different variations of crazy come together to make a whole sane person."

Discussion

Working group re-evaluation

We've had a few months with working groups, and think now is a good time to do a small retrospective on whether the strategy is working well for us. One concern that we have is that team members are feeling overloaded on working groups. Several members felt a good amount of FOMO (fear of missing out) during the sign up process, expecting that all the interesting discussions would occur in the working group, rather than at the LDM. This has lead to the working groups not actually being able to get anything done and taking up more development time that was intended. Some of the working groups have also met a bit too often, when there wasn't enough driving interest. Working groups are creative effort, and trying to force creative effort when there isn't enough enthusiasm doesn't accomplish anything. We've settled on some changes in our process to help the groups be more nimble:

1. Reduce group memberships. While we're not putting constraints on minimum or maximum memberships, LDT members should aim to reduce their workload with the number of groups they join. Group membership should not be a passive topic where you just listen in: it should be an active participant effort.
2. Working groups should bring their progress to the full LDM more often. A significant driver of the over-subscription was FOMO, but the working groups weren't intended to replace the full LDM discussions on topics. Proposals will still be debated in full with the full LDM, and more frequent check-ins will help make sure that the proposals are still a product of the entire group. While the working group can delve into spaces and form opinions, authority is still with the LDM for the final shape of proposals.
3. Reduce meeting frequency. Most groups went out and scheduled recurring meetings every week. This was too often for most groups, and resulted in overburdening the group leaders who needed to establish topics and record notes. Teams should meet as often as makes sense for the team: if there's been no progress on an idea, we shouldn't try to force the creative process. As part of this, some groups may stop meeting altogether, and that's ok.

We hope this set of changes will enable the working groups to be more effective, and make sure that LDT members have enough time to contribute to working groups while continuing to work on their regular teams.