Wanting to get community feedback on adding a search feature to rails, my immediate instinct was to create a github issue for it [proposal] ActiveSearch - Rails Search · Issue #40989 · rails/rails · GitHub.
Elieen was kind enough to point out rails uses this forum here for feature requests. It is outlined in this rails guide and in my excitement I didn’t read it (shameful I know 
).
Unpacking this a little further, I realized the reason I posted it on github issues were that all other communities I engage with use github issues for feature requests. Those would be the javascript communities like: VueJS, Cypress, VSCode, React, etc all use github issues.
Looking a little further, expo has a public roadmap based on upvoted feature requests. This is extremely useful to help you know current limitation and where you as a contributor can help. For example, if you wanted in-app purchases, which is planned, you can ask if you can try to take it on if you need that for a project.
This brings me to two problems with using this forum:
- Low visibility compared to github issues - I’ve been doing rails 7+ years and never knew about this. Looking at this issue it is clear that others are struggling to find it too. Thus, we get lower community engagement.
- Lack of transparency - this has been brought up a few times that a lot of planned work for rails is not transparent enough. In my experience it is easier to merge a PR if the reviewer and author both have prior agreement on scope/overall approach. It is easier to discuss these things closer to the code on a github issue.
I understand this will mean a change to how the PM process of rails and I do not have full-context to whether or not it makes sense. However it is worth while considering.
Ultimate goal: increase community engagement and collaboration.