Handling Issues

The Working Group needs a process to ensure that it doesn't get bogged down with a growing list of issues in GitHub (all issues collected from other sources are moved to GitHub as issues).

Sometimes issues remain on the list for long periods of time, usually due to one of the following reasons:

• No one steps up to work on the issue
• The group cannot arrive at consensus for the issue

We propose a more explicit process whereby issues that have lingered as open issues for too long (over a month) need to be marked as deferred and closed in GitHub. All of these issues will remain searchable and we will have a wiki page that exposes the search method simply. In addition, the issues can be reopened if someone is interested enough to commit time to work on the issue.

1. An issue is on the GitHub issues list for > 1 month.
2. A chair will comment that the issue will be marked as deferred and closed unless someone can work on it.
   • If someone indicates that they will work on it during that week, great, otherwise the issue gets marked as deferred and closed.
3. If someone wants to engage with a closed item, they can simply comment/link to a relevant pull request and reopen the issue.
   • If someone comments lightly (e.g. "I think that we shouldn't defer this") and reopens the issue, but isn't making any significant contribution to progress the issue forward, the chairs may exercise discretion to close the issue again.