I would honestly suggest we use a dedicated section of the wiki to lower the
bar on "early draft" further. Other spec authoring groups have had good luck
with this in the past. Rather than getting council or editor involved or
making anyone push any buttons, just write stuff and collaborate (under the
IPR policy, sure) and when it's "ready" then submit for eyes, votes,
process, numbering, namespace versioning, etc. We can of course do this
without using a wiki and still force everything through github, but it's
more friction.
I'm absolutely fine with a bar to entry, and my gut feeling is that a formal point in the process where a ProtoXEP/pre-XEP enters the IPR policy is cleaner. My personal choice of "bar to entry" would be that the XSF feels the specification is worth working on. Low, but enough to avoid the slop. I'm highly aware that other bodies (like the IETF) have problems with AI-generated I-Ds in bulk, currently, and if you've followed the IPv8 stuff, you'll appreciate that anything published anywhere from the XSF, no matter the name, will convince some people that it's definitely approved universally by everyone.
I would also like stable URLs, and a wiki makes that hard - but inbox names could easily enough generate a redirect, or we could stamp in a link to the XEP.
So, I'm thinking the general idea would be to make inbox be what is now Experimental, and assign a number at Proposed. Given Matt's concern with even using the term Experimental given past implied meanings, I suggest we ditch it and use Inbox.
Adding an additional step is exactly the "left shift" that I think is problematic, so I wouldn't like to see "Inbox -> Experimental -> Proposed -> Stable -> Final".
We should be able to get the button pushing to be minimal (perhaps even non-existent) for inbox updates, but we'll need to list them on the website, send emails to the SIG for updates, and so on. I think this is all achievable with CI, I might try to see if I can write that in GHA.
If these sound sensible I'll update the proposals from my first email later today so we have a concrete set to consider.
Dave.