It always comes back to the resources problem. I’m curious if someone (@gerkey?) is able to shed some light on how much development resources ROS2 currently has, how much help the TSC idea has been in increasing them, and how much development resources are expected to grow in the near future. It won’t really help this discussion but it would put some things in a better context.
I was reminded of this need again this morning by this post on a design pull request. I’m not going to argue against wanting to gather around a whiteboard and discuss things in detail. That would be stupid. It’s by far the most efficient approach (for the people there). But I wonder, were an instantaneous chat platform and instant teleconferencing available and used, if it would be feasible for when such a discussion begins to announce it in the chat and throw up a teleconference for anyone interested and available at that time to join in. I’m grateful that notes were taken and posted to the pull request but if I had the opportunity I would have liked to be involved in that discussion and hear the context for and detail of the comments made.
Another idea is, when a new design pull request or major feature implementation pull request goes up, to schedule a day or two later a teleconference to talk about it as part of the review process. Give people some time to read the document or the code, perhaps start their GitHub-based reviews, but also give a forum after that short period for having a chat about it to clear up more complex concerns.