Today, new features and enhancements are proposed through the developer mailing list, for larger changes requiring a design proposal in community repository. This is not working very well as the developer mailing list can be hard to follow. Design proposals in the community repository allows commenting while the PR is open, but is then harder to follow-up on after they have been merged.

As part of enabling GitHub Discussions it opens up a greater place to gather conversations around new proposals, and with features like participants, labelling and reactions it provides a better way to organise proposals.

The proposal here is that we use Ideas category in GitHub Discussions as the source/inventory as ideas. When making a new proposal it should be done by opening a new discussions there, and the developer mailing list should only serve as a notification. The developer mailing list can be used for lower level implementation discussions, but in general the discussion around a new feature should be happening in GitHub Discussions.

For smaller change proposals the complete proposal can be outlined in the discussion itself, while for larger proposals a design proposal should still be sent to the community repository, and linked to from the discussion. The design proposal should not have a status attached to it, and should be merged relatively quickly (< 2 weeks). While the design proposal PR is open discussions can happen there, but the intent is to close it quickly and have most of the conversation happening through GitHub Discussions.

As a side-not it is worth mentioning that we plan to move away from Keycloak JIRA project to GitHub Issues. This will further emphasis the relevance of GitHub Discussions having a single tool to manage discussions, issues, as well as PRs.