Stages of an initiative

Presuming that an initiative continues successfully, it will go through the following stages:

Phase	Goal	Permits	Successful exit
Proposal	Find a team liaison	Discussion	Team member seconds, thereby agreeing to act as liaison
Experimental (sometimes skipped)	Refine the design and work towards an RFC	Active zulip stream; tracking issue / repository; code can land under "unstable" feature gate	RFC is approved by team
Development	Finalize design and implementation	Removing the "experimental" tag on a feature	Liaison declares the proposal feature complete
Feature complete	Gathering feedback	Advertisting the initiative as "feature complete"	Stabilization proposal approved
Stabilized		Use on stable branch	(none)

The "experimental" stage can be skipped if the initiative is sufficiently simple that a RFC doesn't seem necessary; see "simple initiatives" below.

Initiatives can also become inactive for a variety of reasons.

Simple initiatives

The above process is the ideal, but there are alternative routes that occur in practice for simple initiatives. The most common is one that begins with a PR:

Implement the idea and open a PR.
Nominate the PR to the lang team's attention.
The lang team may opt to either approve the PR (skip directly to "feature complete"), assign an owner (skip directly to "development"), or to request a proposal.

Umbrella initiatives

Some initiatives are broader in scope and are tagged as "umbrella initiatives". These are far-reaching tasks like "async I/O". While they have goals, they don't have a clear stage. Instead, they have project boards (and potentially subinitiatives) of their own that track their state.

Diagram

graph TD
    HaveGoodIdea[Have a good idea]
    FileLangProposal[File proposal issue<br>on lang-team repository]
    RejectWithExplanation[Proposal closed,<br>with an explanation of why]
    Experimental[Expermental: Iterate on design and develop an RFC]
    Development["Develop implementation"]
    FeatureComplete["Feature complete"]
    Stabilized["Stabilization is approved"]

    HaveGoodIdea-- Idea seems ready -->FileLangProposal
    HaveGoodIdea-- iterate on internals/zulip/etc -->HaveGoodIdea

    FileLangProposal-- Concept declined by lang team -->RejectWithExplanation
    FileLangProposal-- Liason seconds, no RFC required-->Development
    FileLangProposal-- Liason seconds, RFC required -->Experimental

    Experimental-- RFC is approved -->Development
    Development -- Iterate and improve design --> Development;
    Development -- Ready for people to experiment --> FeatureComplete;
    FeatureComplete -- Decide to make changes --> Development;
    FeatureComplete -- Prepare stabilization report --> Stabilized;