[Proposal] Set up GitHub Discussions as the entry point for unplanned work #105

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Overview

Contributors open issues asking to be assigned, and pull requests with no issue behind them. We have
no single place to evaluate that work, and no stated turnaround, so each case is handled ad hoc.

Establish GitHub Discussions as the entry point for unplanned work, and the process around it.

Complexity: Medium
Target branch: main

Context

#67 covered two halves. The automation half landed in #103, which acts on the issue a community pull
request closes. This issue tracks the other half, the process, which #67 describes in
#67 (comment).

The reasons recorded there:

• a place to talk about and evaluate work we did not plan
• one pipeline, and somewhere to state our processing times
• the ability to close an issue or pull request we cannot think through right now, while pointing
  the contributor somewhere to clarify first

The Change

Set up the Discussion. Create the category for unplanned work, and say in it what belongs there
and how long an answer takes.

Write the process. Say how an unplanned request is evaluated, who evaluates it, and what the
outcomes are.

Point contributors to it. Update the contributing guidelines and the bot messages that answer an
assignment request or an unlinked pull request, so they name the Discussion rather than leaving a
contributor to guess.

Out of Scope

• The automation in Act on the issue a community pull request closes #103.
• Auto-closing pull requests with no linked issue. That is the stricter option below, and it waits
  on this process proving itself.

Acceptance Criteria

• A Discussion category exists for unplanned work, and says what belongs there.
• The stated turnaround is written down where contributors can read it.
• The process says who evaluates a request and what the outcomes are.
• The contributing guidelines point to the Discussion.
• The bot messages that answer an assignment request point to the Discussion.

Follow-up

If the Discussion works, we can go stricter and auto-close every pull request with no linked issue,
with a note pointing to the Discussion. That would also let us auto-review the rest, even when the
issue is not linked correctly. #67 records this as a later decision, and it can come sooner if
unplanned pull requests become more frequent.

References

• Create process for unplanned work and automate PR handling based on linked issue assignment #67 is the parent. Its automation half is Act on the issue a community pull request closes #103.
• Require an open pull request before a second issue assignment #104 gates a second issue assignment on an open pull request.
• Slack thread with the
  original discussion.

AI usage

I used Claude Code to draft this issue from #67 and its comment thread. I decided the scope and the
split from the automation work.