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[announce] Delegation of responsibility for spec finalisation

Solderpunk solderpunk at posteo.net

Sun Feb 28 12:02:39 GMT 2021

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Howdy Geminauts,

The first quarter of 2021 is passing by rapidly, with less progress onfinalising the few outstanding spec questions before the process oftranslating the specification to a more precise and formal formatsuitable for standardisation than I had hoped for.

It has become clear to me that for a variety of reasons I am no longerable to effectively lead this process myself. Therefore, effective asof the sending of this email, I am delegating decision-making authorityfor finalising the spec to Sean Conner <sean at conman.org>.

There is no change in my long-standing overall stance that Geminirequires no new features and that remaining work on the specificationshould be directed only toward addressing edge cases, removingambiguities and increasing overall consistency. Several issues of thistype have been in discussion on the mailing list for some time now, andI am empowering Sean to resolve those issues, not to add new features ormake other major changes. I reserve the right to veto Sean's decisions,but I don't expect to need to.

Sean is a natural choice for me to delegate this task to. He has beeninvolved in the development of the Gemini specification for longer thananybody other than myself - he was the first person to actuallyimplement the protocol in software, transforming it from the largelyacademic thought experiment that I had created it as into an actual realworld project. He is the developer of a Gemini server (GLV-1.12556) andthe admin of a server running it (gemini://gemini.conman.org), whichmeans the details of the specification are of direct and practicalrelevance to him. He has a long-standing presence in Gopherspace, wherethe Gemini project was born, and therefore understands and appreciatesthe value of simple-by-design systems with limited scope. Finally, hehas an excellent track record of constructively engaging with themailing list even at its busiest and most frantic, which certainly canno longer be said for me. For all these reasons I trust him to makegood decisions on the basis of careful consideration.

I am hopeful that this change will bring us more quickly to a pointwhere there is no more need for decision making and just the slow, quietwork of formalisation. I still hope to be actively involved in thatprocess myself.

Cheers,Solderpunk