It's become very apparent to me in the last months that the way we've (we as in the "ChiliProject team") been reaching decisions is at best hard to follow. IRC is nice for discussions but doesn't really work for longer asynchronous exchanges, furthermore IRC is not logged (good enough) and shouldn't therefore be a source of "truth". The forums and/or issues don't really cut it either because even if you get notifications about new discussions there, it's "one among many" and might thus get lost in the "ambient noise" and needs a "context" change because you can't answer from a feed reader and/or most people will click the link and go to the website rather than answer the notification e-mail. This is exacerbated by the fact that our dev meetings that should have happened monthly have been hard to organize (because of time constraints and time zone problems), have not happened regularly and are by definition a bottleneck for decisions.

I propose we setup a dev mailing list which is world-readable so interested people can follow but to which only the team can post. We can then discuss important stuff (delay a release, what to do in the next release, discuss a proposed feature that needs a decision and so on) and be more transparent about those decisions. I already discussed this with Holger, and as an example for my point I can't link to the log of the discussion on IRC, which makes it impossible even for other team members to know what's been discussed there. I don't say we shouldn't discuss stuff on IRC or wherever, but the important arguments or at least the results should be posted to the list so there's a log of it and others can react to it.

TL;DR: monthly dev meetings don't work, IRC, issues, or the forum don't cut it, we should have a chiliproject-dev mailing list for discussions and decisions.

What do you think?