Thank you for the proposal! I think there’s definitely a gap to be filled in the LLVM community here, and some kind of ‘shepherd’ is a good approach. A few points:
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I think an explicit responsibility of the shepherd should be ensuring that the right people have had input (preames gave a great description of this - so I won’t elaborate further!). We should also acknowledge that there is a judgement call in terms of how much input is required based on the specifics of an RFC (some have wide-ranging long term impact, others don’t).
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I don’t think shepherds need to map to code owners - to act as a shepherd someone needs to be familiar enough with the community norms and the active contributors to be able to make informed judgements about whether the right people have weighed in on a topic etc. But that’s not an ability limited to code owners, and although you need some familiarity I don’t think the ‘shepherd’ necessarily needs to be intimately familiar with the aspect of LLVM the RFC is written about.
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A somewhat minor note on phrasing. If we go in this direction, I imagine this RFC will be used as the basis for the documentation on the role of the shepherd. I think I fully agree with “give more of the project experts the authority to evaluate and decide community consensus for the future direction of the project.” But the penultimate paragraph’s talk about “authoritative decision makers” threw me off a little bit, as I thought it was going down a different path.