- produce a publicly-accessible proposal describing your change:
- Please use Google Docs, or an equivalent system capable of collaborative editing, with versioned history and threaded comments.
- We do not use Github issues (or Etherpad) for the design process of the proposal, as the document review/commenting capabilities aren't good enough.
- We also don't jump straight to PRing against the spec itself, as it's much faster to iterate on a proposal in freeform document form than in the terse and formal structure of the spec.
- In the proposal, please clearly state the problem being solved, and the possible solutions being proposed for solving it and their trade-offs.
- Proposal documents are intended to be as lightweight and flexible as the author desires; there is no formal template; the intention is to iterate as quickly as possible to get to a good design.
- make a new issue at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues, whose description should list the metadata as per below.
- Gather feedback as widely as possible from the community and core team on the proposal.
- The aim is to get maximum consensus on the trade-offs chosen to get an optimal solution.
- Iterating on the proposal and getting consensus can sometimes be time-consuming; an impartial 'shepherd' can be assigned to help guide the proposal through this process.
- Once the proposal has consensus and passed review, you **must** show an implementation to prove that it works well in practice, before before a spec PR will be accepted. Iterate on the proposal if needed.
- Finally, please make a new spec PR which includes the proposed changes against https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/tree/master/specification. This will then be reviewed and hopefully merged!
The process for handling proposals is described in the following diagram. Note that the lifetime of a proposal is tracked through the corresponding labels for each stage in the `matrix-doc issue tracker <https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues>`_.
We use labels and some metadata in the issue's description to generate this page. Labels are assigned by the core team whilst triaging the issues based on those which exist in the matrix-doc repo already.
- the MSC (Matrix Spec Change) number is taken from the github issue ID. This is carried for the lifetime of the proposal, including the PR creation phase. N.B. They are not in chronological order!
- Author is the creator of the github issue, but can be overriden by adding a "Author: @username" line in the body of the issue description. Please make sure @username is a github user (include the @!)
- A shepherd can be assigned by adding a "Shepherd: @username" line in the issue description. Again, make sure this is a real Github user.
