Writing an evaluation
When an initiative involves a complex design task, the initiative owner begins by writing an evaluation. The evaluation documents the various design options and their tradeoffs, and also includes a recommendation. Evaluations are posted publicly and presented to the relevant Rust teams, which will discuss with the owners and stakeholders ultimately make a choice on how to proceed.
The current draft for each evaluation will be maintained in some git repository, often a dedicated repository for the initiative. The repository will also list the stakeholders associated with that particular effort.
Getting feedback
Developing an evaluation consists of first preparing an initial draft by surveying initial work and then taking the following steps (repeat until satisfied):
- Review draft in meetings with stakeholders
- These meetings can be a small, productive group of people
- Often better to have multiple stakeholders together so people can brainstorm together, but 1:1 may be useful too
- Present the draft to the teams and take feedback
- Review issues raised on the repo (see below)
- Adjust draft in response to the above comments
Issues on the repo
In addition to the active outreach to stakeholders, anyone can submit feedback by opening issues on the repositories storing the draft evaluations. These reposies will have issue categories with templates that categorize the feedback and provide some structure. For example:
- Experience report
- Proposal feedback
- Crazy new idea