I'm proposing to add a formal process for how we deal with (major) improvements to Flink and design docs. This has been mentioned several times recently but we never took any decisive action to actually implement such a process so here we go.
Right now, we have Jira issues and we sometimes we have design docs that we keep in Google Docs. Jamie recently added links to those that he could find on the mailing list to the Flink wiki: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/Apache+Flink+Home. The problem with these is that a) the comments on the Google Docs are not reflected in Jira and the mailing list. There has been some very active discussion on some of the docs that most people would never notice. The community therefore might seem less active than it actually is. b) the documents are not very discoverable, if we had a clearly defined place where we put them and also prominently link to this on the Flink homepage this would greatly help people that try to find out about current developments. Kafka has a process like this: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Kafka+Improvement+Proposals. They call it KIP, for Kafka Improvement Proposal. We could either adapt this for Flink or come up with our own process. Doing the former would save us a lot of time and I don't think the Kafka community would mind us copying their process. The subject also hints at this, our process could be called FLIP, for Flink Improvement Proposal. What do you think? Feedback is highly welcome. :-) Cheers, Aljoscha
